On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 09:39 +0800, John Summerfied wrote: > I've been perusing my mail logs and I see mail, some from fedora-list, > being declined for these reasons: > 1. Encoded bodies > 2. Non-roman character sets > 3. being called Peter Whalley > > 1. As most experienced list members prefer plain text, I don't > understand the need for base64-encoding of bodies. The only purpose it > serves that I know about is to attempt to subvert mail filters. I figure > if you don't want me to filter on content, I don't want your email. Fair enough. Base64 encoded plain text goes straight to the bitbucket on my system too, except for mailing list messages, which are all whitelisted. > 2. Non-roman character sets implies the mail's not written in English or > any of the other European languages. If anyone writes to me it better be > in English because my French hasn't seen much practice since I completed > school 40 years ago, and I know no other languages, and English is in > any event the standard language for this list. Bouncing mail using > non-roman character sets means I get to not see lots of Chinese, > Japanese and Korean spam. It also means you'll get not to see lots of mail in English from people whose first language is something that needs a different encoding hence their normal mail setting is for other character sets. They don't change character sets to send messages in English because it's a hassle to do so and there's no need, since the characters needed to communicate in English are also present in their default character set. > 3. I think we discussed this enough some time ago. The filter dropped > quite a deal of email. I never saw a Peter Whalley bounce because my mailserver rejects uol.com.br mails on the basis of that domain having no working postmaster address. > I'd like the folk who're compiling the guidelines to add the first two > points, and ask the list admin to enforce it. Along with any other good > ideas these suggestions trigger. I'd hope that the guidelines are well peer-reviewed so that problematic suggestions such as (2) can be weeded out before they're cast in stone. Whatever anti-spam measures Red Hat have in place for this list already seem to work *very well*, given the almost entire lack of spam on this list (the "computer for sale" message earlier today was one of the very very few that got through, and that wasn't a classic mail-to-all-and- sundry spam either), and I don't see any urgent need to change that. Paul. -- Paul Howarth <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
