What works in list e-mail

Usman S. Ansari wrote (quoting from the raw message):

<snip>
> Message-ID: <204043.34085.qm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> X-RedHat-Spam-Score: 3.381 ***
<snip>
> ... anyway upon booting, last thing it said was diabling XEN buffers and
> after that my machine froos <img
> src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/02.gif";>

Hi Usman,

It looks like you're using Yahoo web mail, and using "picture" smileys
provided by yimg.com. (Possibly Yahoo makes it look like they're "a part
of Yahoo mail": I don't use it so I can't tell.)

May I recommend you *don't* do that, for three reasons?

Firstly, many Linux and Unix mail clients won't display the HTML version
of your e-mail at all. Their users won't see the smiley, or any
indication that you meant to put anything there.

Secondly, your e-mail was constructed in such a way that the smiley
wasn't distributed with your e-mail, but each client would have had to
have downloaded it from yimg.com. That means yimg.com would be able to
tell whenever anyone read your e-mail.

That's considered unfriendly -- almost like spying on us. Many bulk
e-mailers (including spammers) use specially-constructed filenames for
the downloaded pictures, so they can cross-refer which e-mail went to
which e-mail address, when it was read, how often and where.

So most mail clients on Linux and Unix (and an increasing amount on other
platforms) won't load these images. That means *those* users won't see
the smiley anyway.

Thirdly, many spam filters will spot these picture references, and score
up your e-mail accordingly. (Not only is it a way for spammers to check
which e-mail addresses are being read, spam messages encoded as pictures
are relatively difficult for spam filters to analyse. So all messages
with embedded pictures come under suspicion).

You can see that you got a relatively high score from Red Hat's spam
filter. That's not good -- if you happened to include a few other
"spam-like" phrases, your e-mail could have been blocked.

Finally, we prefer that you don't send HTML-formatted e-mail to the list
at all. The Mailing List Guidelines for Fedora mailing lists can be found
at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#postingguidelines
along with a link to pages explaining how to turn it off.

Hope this helps,

James.

(For what it's worth, I only spotted this because your message scored
highly enough on my spam filters to go into the "unsure" box, and I
wanted to find out why.)

-- 
E-mail:     james@ | The camel has a single hump;
aprilcottage.co.uk | The dromedary two;
                   | Or else the other way around.
                   | I'm never sure.  Are you?                 -- Ogden Nash