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Today's Topics:
1. Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
(Thomas Hochstein)
2. Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
(Jason Evans)
3. Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
(Russ Allbery)
4. Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
(Jason Evans)
5. Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
(Thomas Hochstein)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 14:48:27 +0100
From: Thomas Hochstein <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 3/11/23 6:06 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Relaying messages to moderators in a way that doesn't get them
>> filtered out as spam is probably the most severe issue, and I'm
>> dubious encapsulation would help much.
>
> Would you please elaborate on your concerns about encapsulation?
Current moderator tools mostly just reformat a mail message to a news
article.
> I'd think that message/rfc822 attachments would suffice for most things.
AFAIS the discussion is about implementing the
application/news-transmission Content-Type from RFC 5537. Moderator tools
would have to change form reformatting a mail message to extracting an
article that is submittend with a Content-Type of
application/news-transmission from a mail.
Quoting from RFC 5537, 3.5.1:
| Although both of these methods have been used in the past and the
| first has clear technical advantages, the second is in more common
| use and many moderators are not prepared to deal with messages in the
| first format. Accordingly, the first method SHOULD NOT be used
| unless the moderator to which it is being forwarded is known to be
| able to handle this method.
-thh
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 16:36:28 +0100
From: Jason Evans <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
On 3/12/23 02:06, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Julien ?LIE <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Incidentally, speaking about encapsulating messages in an
>> application/news-transmission Content-Type for the moderation process,
>> how could we advance in that subject?
> My suspicion is that what Usenet moderation that remains is done with a
> wide variety of hand-written bits and pieces.? STUMP was the closest to a
> standard toolkit and it was quirky and a bit odd and I don't believe it's
> been maintained in many years.
Just FYI, the Big-8 board adopted Stump/Webstump a while back. We took
it from being an unmaintained a source tarball with outdated perl
libraries to being mostly functional, patched, and available in a modern
repository.
However, IMHO it does need a complete re-write.
Repos:
https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/stump
https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/webstump
Jason
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 08:45:06 -0700
From: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain
Grant Taylor <[email protected]> writes:
> On 3/11/23 6:06 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Relaying messages to moderators in a way that doesn't get them filtered
>> out as spam is probably the most severe issue, and I'm dubious
>> encapsulation would help much.
> Would you please elaborate on your concerns about encapsulation?
> I'd think that message/rfc822 attachments would suffice for most things.
> Though that is predicated on an MUA that knows how to deal with them.
It's not that it's not technically fine -- it certainly is -- but the main
problem with moderation right now is that the email sent to the moderator
gets rejected or discarded along the way by spam filters. If we used
encapsulation, this would have the advantage of no longer sending email
apparently from an address that has no relation to the transmission path
(probably good for not triggering spam filters) but the disadvantage of
looking very weird and having nested encapsulation structure (very bad for
spam filtering because spam filters usually treat all unusual messages as
a sign of phishing).
And if I were to pick one thing that threatens the moderation system the
most, it would be messages going silently missing because the email server
of the moderator decides that a lot of the moderation messages are spam
and therefore all of them are spam and starts silently throwing them all
away.
--
Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 17:05:34 +0100
From: Jason Evans <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
On 3/12/23 16:45, Russ Allbery wrote:
> It's not that it's not technically fine -- it certainly is -- but the main
> problem with moderation right now is that the email sent to the moderator
> gets rejected or discarded along the way by spam filters. If we used
> encapsulation, this would have the advantage of no longer sending email
> apparently from an address that has no relation to the transmission path
> (probably good for not triggering spam filters) but the disadvantage of
> looking very weird and having nested encapsulation structure (very bad for
> spam filtering because spam filters usually treat all unusual messages as
> a sign of phishing).
>
> And if I were to pick one thing that threatens the moderation system the
> most, it would be messages going silently missing because the email server
> of the moderator decides that a lot of the moderation messages are spam
> and therefore all of them are spam and starts silently throwing them all
> away.
I think this is more of an education issue than a technical one. I think
the best thing to do if someone is interested in moderating is to
suggest that they proactively account for their mail services's spam
filter even if that means white-listing all mail coming to the
moderation account. Though this may not be possible when using services
like gmail.
Speaking from experience, I'm a moderator on 3 different newsgroups and
we really don't see that much spam coming through (not that much traffic
either). If someone emailed us directly or posted on a non-moderated
group like news.groups asking why their posts are not getting though, I
would consider altering or removing our spam filter.
Jason
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 18:58:44 +0100
From: Thomas Hochstein <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Russ Allbery wrote:
> My suspicion is that what Usenet moderation that remains is done with a
> wide variety of hand-written bits and pieces.
That seems spot on to me.
In de.*, only de.newusers.questions (the local version of
news.newusers.questions) is running a rather versatile moderation bot with
filtering capabilities, white- and blacklisting and a web frontend, but
that was never published and has now been in "emergency maintenance" mode
for many years (if it breaks, it will be fixed some way, as time permits).
> STUMP was the closest to a
> standard toolkit and it was quirky and a bit odd and I don't believe it's
> been maintained in many years.
There was also "huhu" of the late Alexander Bartolich; unfortunately, the
website with the moderation interface for most groups using that software
at huhu.albasani.net went down with news.albasani.net and most/all other
services after a harddisk failure.
The SVN repository seems to be lost after that; I have saved a checkout
from 07/2012, but - unlike git - that means just the files, without any
history.
-thh
------------------------------
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