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Tag, You're It! (was: Adding SpamAssassin Headers to IETF mail)

2003-12-17 07:51:43
On Tue December 16 2003 22:35, Sujit Menon wrote:

Subject line should have only: (IETF Mailing List)

Do you mean only as in, that should be the entire subject line, or as 
in, that should be all that should be in the tag prepended to the 
subject line?  As a tag, it's still much longer than need be, so I'll 
ass-u-me you mean that that should be the entire subject line.

and by adding an
example of GNU SIP mailing list Sent by: osip-bounces(_at_)atosc(_dot_)org
in the mail from header.

Do you mean the data sent in the "MAIL FROM" part of the first SMTP 
exchange, which IIRC shows up as the Return-Path: header, or the 
user-set From: header?  Since you didn't use caps, and wrote header, I 
will ass-u-me you meant the From: header.

This will make it easier to set rules in our mail boxes

Uh, no, in fact quite the opposite, if I understand you correctly.

Your proposed Subject line would destroy the usefulness of the subject 
line, aside from telling that it's from this list.  You wouldn't be 
able to scan through the list and pick out the ones that are on 
specific topics you want to read about (and read them), or that aren't 
(and delete them), let alone do any automatic filtering on the subject, 
whether based on interest or spamminess.

Your proposed From line would make it much harder for us to filter out 
people we don't want to hear from (whether done manually or 
automatically, and whether to authors who are legit, kooks, or 
spammers), and to send replies directly to the author.

Long story short, here's my proposal:

- Tag the stuff [ietf]. Six chars, seven with a space.  Big fat hairy 
deal!

- Keep the author in the From.

- Keep NOT putting the list in a Reply-To, so people have to purposely 
intend to send to the list in order to add to its traffic.

- Don't filter spam.  We can do it ourselves, and spam seems to be a 
negligible proportion of this list's email.  The extra headers added by 
SpamAssasin and so forth would waste far more bandwidth than the spam!

- Make the archives munge addresses.  I *have* been getting spam at 
addresses I've used only here, and the public archives are the most 
likely explanation.  (They're much too useful for me to ask to make 
them private, but if "privatize the archives" is the concensus, then 
I'd go along with it.)

-- 
Dave Aronson, Senior Software Engineer, Secure Software Inc.
(Opinions above NOT those of securesw.com unless so stated!)
Email me at: work (D0T) 2004 (@T) dja (D0T) mailme (D0T) org
Web: http://destined.to/program http://listen.to/davearonson




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