Albrecht Dreß e-mails get filtered on the YDL list (was RE: [IMPORTANT] SOUND!!!!)

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 12:35:20 -0800, Longman, Bill wrote:

>> [quoted text muted]
> 
> Hmm....I hope not to be on that wave, then. The only thing I see from his
> messages are the TSS mailman trailers. Obviously that is working correctly.
> What I don't understand are the assertions that my mailer is broken, all
> mailers of the future will contain attachments and that deleting attachment
> messages is rude.

I didn't say that all "mailers of the future" will contain attachments,
although that is possible because the trend is to not automatically embed
anything but typed text. Albrecht's messages are plain text with his GPG
key stored as an attachment. TerraSoft's archives see only the attachment
and not the message itself. That is not working correctly.

> Albrecht, under the moderately-acceptable assumption that you are using a
> mailer to post your messages to the list, isn't there some way for you to
> configure it as text without attaching the message?

His attachments do not contain his messages, only his GPG key. If you are
seeing only an attachment (before you delete, that is), your mailer is not
reading received messages properly. That's the only possible explanation.

>> [quoted text muted]
> 
> A valid political question for the list is how to handle attachments sent to
> the list. I don't like them because I don't need or want them. If I did, I'd
> go find them. And I'm not about to start opening any unsolicited
> attachments.

Nobody is asking you to open any attachments. The attachments should be
deleted when using mailers that don't understand them. However, summarily
deleting the whole message instead of just the attachment because your
mailer falsely but acceptably believes a file is attached is like hanging
up on a call placed through 711 because you can't hear sound of the
caller's voice. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unsolicited files are something nobody needs or wants, but that is not
what this is.

In review, there are two issues here:
1) You are seeing an attachment with no message where you should see,
depending on your mailer, either a message with no attachment or a message
with an attachment.
2) You're not just deleting messages that contain attachments, but you're
doing it summarily. Deleting messages is something we should all do, but
we should first check if the message is worth reading. This can be done by
the mail client or by hand, but the process should be reasonable. If your
method tells you not to read messages that you find you want to read
anyway, it's not reasonable.

This discussion is dangerously close to the subject of spam and how to
deal with it. It would be wrong of me to dictate how you personally should
deal with spam. It would be even more wrong for you to deal with it in
whatever way you're told without first having all the facts about what
you're doing.