[Xitami] Preventing abuse of mailing lists

[Brian {Hamilton Kelly}]

In message <EF8DD0ED6D7ED211AEF900805F77918E0807D1EF@az25exm03.geg.mot.com>
   Tran David-P94446 writes:

> This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand
> this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.
> 
> ------_=_NextPart_000_01C11A0B.C50CAFF0
> Content-Type: text/plain;
> 	charset="iso-8859-1"
[snip]
> 
> ------_=_NextPart_000_01C11A0B.C50CAFF0
> Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
> 	name="router.net"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
> Content-Disposition: attachment;
> 	filename="router.net"
> 
[snip 269 lines of Base64 encoded information (which presumably was
originally a text file)]
> ------_=_NextPart_000_01C11A0B.C50CAFF0--
> 
> --
> Xitami Users Mailing List -- For Xitami support
> To unsubscribe: http://lists.xitami.org/mailman/listinfo/xitami
> 

There have been a number of cases of "Outlook Abuse" of late in this
mailing list.  Could I suggest to the moderator that he modifies the
mailing list software such that it scans headers for:
>   Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
or possibly even for:
>   Content-Type: multipart/*.
and rejects them by bouncing back to the originator, with a note to say
that ONLY plain ASCII text messages are acceptable for the list?

There is never any valid reason for multi-posting an article twice, in
both ASCII and HTML (except that this is the stupid configuration in
which Outlook Express and some other Windozy MUAs are set by default).
It's a hundred (thousand? whatever?) times worse for that dual-posting to
be exploded out in separate copies to every member of a mailing list.

Likewise for large enclosures/attachments: that "binary" was 24 kilobytes
long; it was exploded out a hundred- or more-fold, when whatever might be
the part of it significant to the particular problem being reported was
only a line or two long.

Understandably, there are many people nowadays who have had no tradition
of using mailing lists, and treat them as if they were one-to-one
communication with someone else on the same LAN in the office.  Sadly,
the time has long passed when these people can be educated, so it really
needs the mailing list software to step in and prevent this abuse ---
remember that in many parts of the world, people pay for every second
that they are connected on-line, and do not want to be kept on-line for
ten times as long receiving unnecessarily prolix mails full of Microsoft
bloat.

-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                          bhk@dsl.co.uk
    "We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of
    distributed ignorance.  And we know and understand less while being incr-
    easingly capable."              Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs