[SGVLUG] Updated: San Gabriel Valley Linux® Users Group (SGVLUG) Developer SIG (DevSIG) monthly meeting

[Jeff Carlson]

Dustin Laurence wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 01, 2006 at 12:37:17PM -0700, Michael B. Parker wrote:

Content obviously removed for sanity purposes.

> I must say, this is the most annoying mail formatting I have ever come
> across.  Must be some awful Microsoft thing.  I have been immediately
> deleting these messages for precisely that reason.  Can you use a decent
> mailer, or should I just tell procmail to kill it?  I assure you I'm
> never going to wade through that crap to figure out what the mail is
> about.

Until Dustin posted this message, I was unaware that I had received any 
messages from Mr. Parker.  I saw Tom's response, but since I didn't ever 
see the original, I thought he was CCing his response to a different 
list that I'm not on.  I checked my spam folder and SpamAssassin had 
caught two previous messages from this sender, assigning them scores of 
8.5 and 8.6.

You know, it's nothing to score a two or a three in SpamAssassin.  I 
have a lot of add-on rules from www.rulesemporium.com.  Some people's 
addresses get listed in RBLs for various reasons and SpamAssassin is 
configured to add a couple points for that.  But for the most part, most 
people who are sending legitimate email will still score under a 5.0, 
which is my threshold (and the default).

When I look at the report headers from these messages, I see some cases 
of what can be classified as simple mistakes in the message, like a URL 
appearing with no dots.  Sometimes SpamAssassin tags that when it wasn't 
the original author's intent to actually indicate a URL.  No big deal. 
But what I'm seeing here is a bunch of stuff that I genuinely do not 
want to see in my email.  First, the Subject: header was encoded.  But 
it wasn't encoded in a foreign language, the character set is still 
Latin.  So what was the point of that?  As Dustin said, bad formatting 
from a bad email client.

But more over, what really gets me is that there are a lot of rules that 
got triggered because of really bad HTML formatting.  I'm just going to 
be frank about this.  I do not in any circumstance appreciate being sent 
emails in HTML format for any reason ever.  I think it is extremely rude 
to send someone HTML formatted email at all, and even just downright 
disrespectful to do so to a mailing list.  My mail server blocks any 
message in which the Content-type: header states text/html.  If you 
can't be so courteous as to at least include a plain text portion of 
your message, I don't want to even know you emailed me.  And for those 
messages that do get through because they are multipart/alternative with 
both text/plain and text/html portions, I generally will not respond to 
them, even if they are from a mailing list and I know the answer.  I 
just won't encourage that behavior by helping people out if they can't 
configure their mailer properly.

Spam is any email message that contains content I didn't ask to receive. 
   I might be subscribed to this, and many other mailing lists, but I 
have absolutely no appreciation for someone who feels it is necessary to 
fill up my hard drive by more than tripling the size of every message 
they send with superfluous formatting details that I'd rather not see in 
the first place.  I also have no tolerance for the elitist attitude that 
I should be using a mailer capable of displaying that formatting 
information, or that I should have all the fonts the sender has on his 
computer as well.  This is my computer and I'll use it however I see 
fit, and if that were to mean I wanted to use elm 1.0 as my mailer, then 
it's my decision, not yours, and if that were to mean I can't read your 
crap-formatted message then the problem is in what you are sending, not 
my configuration.

It's called catering to the lowest common denominator.  Every mailer can 
read text/plain just fine.  It's what email started with, and it's what 
we should all be using.  I have no objection to someone sending me an 
attachment (as long as I know ahead of time and that it's to me, not a 
list) or to someone asking me, or a web development list, for help with 
HTML and including some example code.  But that's totally different, the 
included example won't render.  Anyway, what if I were blind?  What good 
would all those stupid colors and different fonts and sizes do me in 
that case?  A text to speech engine has no problem interpreting 
text/plain, and neither does a braille renderer.  If you want to send me 
a web page, host it somewhere and send me the URL.

I'm sorry to go off and start a flame war.  I have no personal beef 
against Mr. Parker, who I have never met, so sorry to single you out.  I 
want to ask everyone to be aware of what you are doing, what your 
content really is saying about you, and how much bandwidth and disk 
space you are really consuming.  (Another thing, don't give me any 
argument that disk space is cheap.  How I allocate disk space on my 
computer is not your decision.)  Actually, I would like to ask Michael 
to configure the Mailman setup to drop all non-text/plain attachments to 
the list.  It can be done in the most recent versions of Mailman (I 
believe as of 2.1.0) in the administrative setup.