Questioner in the discussion group referring to an earlier Vixie post: True, anyone could do the job for a price. But volunteers bring more energy to the job.
Vixie: Volunteers are great. Ditto for summer interns. However, when doling out paychecks, I should never have confused fervor with skill. A shocking high fraction of the people MAPS ever hired were not as skillful as people who my various day jobs have fired for nonperformance. Fervor != Skill.
Questioner: You make a lovely Pontius Pilate washing your hands of the mess while MAPS crucifies Gordon. Lucky for you your not “operationally involved”. Kinda makes me wonder just who is without ideology. What exactly *do* you believe in anymore, Paul?
Vixie: I believe I still receive a lot of spam, and that I complain about it, and that once in a while an ISP answers my complaint and sometimes after that the spam stops for a while from that particular customer of that ISP. I believe that John's “all of Korea” list is a sad and terrible and relevant commentary on the state of IP connectivity. I believe that I no longer accept e-mail from 210.0.0.0/8. I believe that Vern's DCC effort has “got legs” and will curb more and more of spam's appetite as the weeks roll by.
But I also believe that I have a family and a day job and that my time for handcuffing myself to a redwood tree to keep someone from cutting it down was probably earlier in my life. I also believe that the $1M that I put into MAPS was a fine beginning but that others besides Dave and I and the various volunteers and underpaid employees of MAPS are also going to have to make some difficult investments rather than sit around NANAE and bitch-fest about how awful other people are.
I believe that many “spam fighters” are really just fighters of opportunity and that spam makes a good fight but that litter-mates will do in a pinch.
If I were ever going to invest my time or money in something like MAPS again then I'd avoid hiring or working with people who either like to fight or who just don't know how to sheathe their own claws, and instead find quietly qualified people who can feel good about ANY job as long as they've done it well.
I believe that my 11-year-old son has received pornographic spam every day since he got his e-mail account at age eight, and that some day I'm going to have to stop prefiltering his e-mail for him, but that I can't decide how old he has to be before he can get face to face with the evil scummy underside of human nature.
I believe that SMTP is doomed the same way and for the same reasons that TELNET was doomed. “Fine for a LAN, not so fine for the wide open internet.”
Sorry, I'm out of time, so that's the short answer.
