At 11:38 PM 11/10/97 -0600, Aaron Schrab wrote:
does a fine job - MIME, OTOH is one of the best ways to mailbomb someone
since it doesn't compress well - but the indirect bombing via mailing lists
MIME has nothing to do with how well a message compresses. Some
content in MIME messages may not compress well, but just the fact that
a message is MIME does not affect compression.
Clarification of my otherwise offhanded statement might be in order - I
mean MIME encoded BINARIES, not MIME-encapsulated text. And in any event,
the MIME encoded binary is 25% larger than it started out. Since the
standard encoding is 4-bytes out per 3-data in, much of the patterns which
may have been in the original are obfuscated by the encoding. Certainly
not entirely lost - and some new patterns can emerge. For a large part,
MIME compresses best with Huffman (due to the limited character set), and RLE.
Compressability IS affected. Not necessarily nullified, but affected.
Personally, I'd like to see more lists implement an "X-Subscription-Info:"
I don't think it would have much affect. People regularly ignore
unsubscribe instructions in the body, I doubt if they'd notice them in
the headers.
Well, there's no helping dolts on the net, now is there? For the rest of
us however, a handy and clear indicator in the headers wouldn't be a bad
addition, IMHO. And being in the headers, more people's software can
enable/disable the header if they don't want to see it, which is a bit more
tricky to manage in the body (use of procmail excepted - and even there, a
simple formail handles the header).
Not all lists you can get yourself subscribed to are listed anywhere easily
accessible - there are plenty of semi-private listservs for which you could
spend quite a while searching for info to get off the list (or look like a
total bonehead posting to the list asking "how do I unsubscribe?").
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Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395