Forum Archive Index - November 2001

[Will Bryant <will@sharechat.co.nz>]

Several matters.  First, Jerrold and others, please do not talk about 
forging email on sharechat.  Forging is not only unethical, it is also (as 
far as anyone can tell) illegal.  I don't like spam either but this is not 
the place to discuss revenge attacks.

Also, you should be aware that you have no real indication who actually 
sent the spam.  An acquaintance of mine has had his email address "stolen", 
that is, put in as the sender of many thousands of spam 
messages.  Consequentially he has received hundreds of irate messages from 
unfortunate spam recipients.  Bear in mind that any retaliation you launch 
may in fact hurt only a third party who had no involvement with the 
spamming.  If you want to do something about it the best thing is to submit 
it to the anti-spam registries.

Secondly, Snoopy concerning your problems with Phaedrus, you refer to the 
RFC requirements for messages encoded using quoted-printable.  However, 
none of the posts I have seen from Phaedrus have been encoded using 
quoted-printable, so AFAIK your information is not directly relevant (I 
believe the MIME specification allows up to 998 characters for some of the 
other encodings and has no limits for others).  However, as you note many 
of the posts from Phaedrus are quite long, and this is presumably the cause 
of the problem.

Jerrod, the mailing list is not doing anything that would unwrap or 
re-encode the message body so IMHO it is not going to be anything to do 
with the problem.  Nor have there been any changes of note to the software 
involved recently.  Emails will only be sent to the list if they are below 
a certain size, but those that exceed that size are either not sent at all 
or if I approve them sent on in their entirety - they are never truncated.

Snoopy, I suspect your problem is due to the POP3 server you use, I once 
had a similar issue where emails I received that had very long lines were 
incorrectly interpreted by the POP server, in fact the email in question 
often ended up with the following email tacked on the end - very messy (the 
bug was subsequently fixed and so the problem went away when I upgraded the 
POP server).

The other two suspects are the SMTP server you use, or your mail 
client.  You probably can't do much if it is the POP or SMTP server but if 
it's a big problem for you it would be worth testing them out in more detail.

Finally, it's not a big issue but it would actually be best if everyone 
just ignored any spam that does manage to make it through (incidentally, we 
will be implementing some measures that should get rid of it completely in 
the near future) - we always remove the spam itself from the archive so 
responding to it just adds to the clutter.

I think any further discussion on any of these matters would probably be 
best taken off-list, since it isn't of interest to most of our users.  (As 
always, you are welcome to contact me with any technical problems using our 
lists.)

_______________________________________________________________________
Will Bryant                                 ShareChat technical manager
will@sharechat.co.nz                        http://www.sharechat.co.nz/


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