In my opinion we have two very different types of 'contact me off list' things going on here.

We have commercial solicitations and people looking to make contacts for buying transport circuits, capacity, etc.

And then on the other hand we have 'contact me off list' asks related to network operational issues, when the subject pertains to what's going on inside a particular AS, or in some peering or traffic routing problem. Not everybody wants their own or their peer's dirty laundry aired in public if something is broken or misconfigured in their relationship to the rest of the global routing table. And particularly not in a context where it will go in a public archive forever.

On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 4:53 PM Brielle <bruns@2mbit.com> wrote:

> On Mar 20, 2021, at 3:44 PM, Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:
>
> A large portion of these emails lately have contained some variation
> of 'contact me off list'. How does that provide any benefit to the
> community? Is anyone else in the community getting any information
> about what providers may be on a pathway that would help them? They
> are not.

This is how I’m viewing a lot of this too. It’s like the posts on stack exchange et al, Reddit, and various forums that are just closed with “fixed” and no details or follow up.

Kinda defeats the whole purpose of a mailing list with an archive since the same questions can come up again and again and no actual answers to the questions.