[LAF] Re: LAF MATTERS 20th March

[Ian Gregory]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 07:03:10AM -0800, EDMUND MCARTHUR wrote:

> Still dont know who is or is not on list so apologies for
> cross posting

Appologies for the tedious nature of the following:-)

All subscribers to laf at aktivix.org are authorised to view
the subscriber list - just go to:

http://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/laf

and enter your email address and password (there is also a
field to enter your email address to get a password reminder
sent).

But since I am posting this to the list I am not revealing
anything you can't find out anyway by doing it for you and
seeing that the seven current subscribers are:

adrianrwilliams at yahoo.co.uk
aktiv at zenatode.org.uk
antines at fsmail.net
antines at yahoo.co.uk
cmichel at cmichel.com
hooper_jackson at yahoo.com
stevphen at mutualaid.org

(actually the two "antines" addresses correspond to the
same person, ie Ed - so there are only six).

It looks like four of these people were also listed in
the "To:" header of Ed's message (two under alternate
addresses assuming ch_michel_valmet at compuserve.com and
cmichel at cmichel.com are one and the same):

adrianrwilliams at yahoo.co.uk
ianji at zenatode.org.uk
hooper_jackson at yahoo.com
ch_michel_valmet at compuserve.com

However, the email never made it to laf at aktivix.org because
Mailman (the mailing list manager used by aktivix) considered
that the message was being sent to too many recipients, and
held it for moderation (the list is set at the default of ten
for what constitutes "too many").

What is confusing is that Ed must have hit "send" twice,
and two identical emails got sent out. So all addresses
listed explicitly in the "To:" field received two copies,
whilst laf at aktivix.org subscribers would not have received it
at all (unless they were also listed in the "To:" field).

OK, so what should I (as list administrator) do about it?
Well the first thing is that I will approve one copy of
the message that was held for moderation so that the two(?)
people who failed to get it when it was sent will get it
within the next few minutes after I send this message.

And for the future? One solution would for me to change the
list setting to have a higher limit for what is considered
"too many" recipients. However, ten is the recommended setting
and in fact this is a useful anti-spam measure.

What Ed could have done is send two separate copies of the
message, one to an explicit list of addresses, and the other
just to laf at aktivix.org

However, it is in the interest of LAF that more people
subscribe to the list, which they can do by visiting:

http://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/laf

we could then eliminate the need to send separately to an
additional list of unsubscribed people.

By the way, personally I would prefer if subscribers follow the
common convention for size of signatures on messages, which is
that they should be no more than four lines, of less than eighty
characters each (this is known as the McQuarry limit). The
signature should be separated from the body of the message by
"sig dashes" which is hyphen,hyphen,space,newline. This is what
is expected by all well configured MUAs (Mail User Agents) and
it does make things work more smoothly. See for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block

Also - and this is the last point, I promise! - Ed is sending
stuff out using an MUA that is including his message twice - as
plain text and as HTML. The HTML attachment gets scrubbed by
Mailman and replaced by a link to a stored version somewhere
else on the aktivix server. This in sub-optimal as it provides
no extra information and just consumes extra storage space on
the aktivix server, which ultimately the good people at aktivix
probably end up paying for.

So could people also please make sure that their MUA is configured
to send out stuff as plain text only.

Thanks,
list admin

-- 
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/