Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
I have noted however, that some subscribers to this list write english
encoded in one of the above character sets, I don't know enough about
the character set definition, but it seems that English characters are a
subset of any character set?
What is the recommended policy here? Should subscribers be advised to
change character set when posting to the list?
No. It's the responsibility of the person doing the filtering - in this
case you -
to exempt any known good e-mail sender from your filters.
You know damn well that legitimate mailing list mail comes from
mx2.freebsd.org (mx2.freebsd.org [216.136.204.119])
it's right in the headers of the messages on the list.
First: You know all too well that filtering based on "Received" header
fields is not reliable - any decent spammer know how to forge that.
Accepting mail from a particular host should be done even before the
mail delivery starts.
Second: If you know postfix, you also know that header filtering is
independent of other checks, even the result of filtering on individual
header lines are independent.
So the ideal you mention is not an option until a complete public list
of authorized mail servers is available and all mail relayed through
these requires authentication.
Or do you have the solution that does not imply accepting any of a
myriad of character sets?
I'd be happy to implement that, but I don't want to open my mail server
to receive mail I have no means of reading and understanding just
because it is RFC compliant.
You have no right to
force other people to conform to what you feel is acceptable formatting
of their message as long as they meet the SMTP rfc standards. That's
why we have RFC's.
You you know perfectly well that content filtering is not based on the
RFC's on SMTP but rather on the Internet Message Format and various
RFC's on MIME - but I assume that you meant to refer to these.
Basically what you say here is that spammers have every right to flood
mail servers as long as they do so compliant with the RFC's?
I don't force anyone to conform to any arbitrary standards that I decide
upon, but I have every legitimate right to reject anything that doesn't
conform to my arbitrary standards.
Yet, it is somewhat implicit that this is an English language list, any
one writing in a different language may be lucky to find someone who can
respond in their language, but are just as often referred to one of the
language specific lists - if their message is not simply ignored.
So we do actually impose some arbitrary rule on subscribers, namely to
write in English. Given that we find it reasonable to impose such a
rule, then why is it unreasonable to impose that they should abstain
from obscure non-English character sets?
I was hoping to find a way that we can all get along, I find it kind of
useless to waste my resources on mail written in languages that I have
no means of interpreting.
If everyone did what your proposing then senders would have hundreds
of different rules they would have to follow, over and above the normal
RFCs.
Well, in real life as well as on-line we have thousands of rules and
customs, implicit or written, on communication and gestures.
There are best practices on how to communicate in e-mail and on mailling
lists, usage of smileys and other types of mood-expression, and
proclaimed best practices on how to quote.
You regularly see people complaining about top posting. Then, line
wrapping, or people who don't delete the trailing message part that they
don't reply to etc.
I don't see a recommendation on character sets as much different.
Cheers, Erik
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