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

[Craig Foster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.linux.org.au 
> [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.linux.org.au] On Behalf Of James Devenish
> Sent: Saturday, 5 June 2004 12:15 PM
> To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> Subject: Re: E-mail conventions (was: Re: [plug] Debian VS Mandrake)
> 
> 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.

I don't mind the removal of cryptographic signatures, Win32 executable
content, and ATT00*.TXT attachments from mailing lists. After an *extremely*
quick browse through the archives, I unsure of whether we block executable
content. It's probably a good idea for a non-Win32 mailing list...  ATT*.TXT
attachments are usually caused by the mail list not wanting to break the
signed emails, so they can go easily enough.
As for crypto attachments, I would feel hypocritical if I didn't use them,
due to my Thawte Notary status, however for this list it's only by habit
that it gets sent.

Finally, we do go on about not munging email, so I think the removal of
text/html would be very hypocritical, but executable content is an
outweighing necessity.


CraigF.
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