E-mail conventions (was: Re: [plug] Debian VS Mandrake)

[James Devenish]

In message <200406051134.39339 at death.2.spammers>
on Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 11:34:39AM +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> On Saturday 05 June 2004 10:04, Tim White wrote:
> > couldn't all the emails coming in to the plug list be sent through a
> > filter? something like html2text that doesn't put the console formating
> > in? Tim
> That'd be as invasive as one that mangeled top-posting.
> 
> Yes; trash _attachments_.

And here we come to a semantic problem: what is "an attachment"? (As
I'm sure Bernd already knows, "attachment" is one of those computing
nouns like "download", "firewall" or "VPN" for which the meaning depends
on audience, technical context, and the prevailing wind speed.) As a
subscriber and list admin, my 'vote' would definitely be against
trashing all "attachments". However, I would be happy to entertain the
idea of trashing anything with a MIME disposition 'attachment' or
Content-Type that was not text/plain or text/enriched. I definitely
want to continue to allow inline text attachments, and probably
message/* attachments, too. I would also be happy to allow cryptographic
signature attachments, though I don't see the need. I am happy to get
rid of image/* and text/html, though I would tend to think that
text/html should be allowed because otherwise we can't help "newbies"
who make their initial postings in HTML. So, my favoured options are
currently to do no filtering, or to filter out non-text content like
images.