On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Jay Maynard wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 10:52:40AM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 08:02:46AM -0600, Jay Maynard wrote:
> > > ...because my mailer rejects any messages with a character set of BIG5,
> > > EUC-KR, or KS_C_5601-1987. I got three of those in the past few days.
> > The right thing to do is to accept these messages and discard them, rather
> > than returning an error.  That way you don't get unsubscribed from anything,
> > and you also don't generate a lot of unhelpful additional traffic for
> > postmasters around the world (spam generally does not have a useful return
> > address).
>
> I don't generate bounces; I reject them during the SMTP transaction.
>
> I do not believe that silently discarding spam is a Good Idea. It's nothing
> more than automation of hitting the delete key, which does nothing to solve
> the spam problem.

And you give them a delivery confirmation (in case of a correct return
address) or create extra "undelivered" loop, in case of an invalid
address. Either way: not a good idea if you assume this is spam.

>
> I can whitelist the linux-390 mailing list...but how many folks here can
> handle those character sets? Displaying them as ASCII is no answer, as it
> shows up as unreadable garbage. I would argue that sending traffic in a
> character set that almost nobody can display properly is just plain being
> unneighborly, not to mention drastically reducing one's chances of getting
> the answers one seeks.
>

Some smart mailers (like mutt and pine ;-) ) use ASCII if the message does
not contain any non-ASCII chars. I'm not sure about mozilla. But I think
it doesn't. Anyway, I believe that non of the MS mailers do. So if you
want to use the same mailer for both (say) chineese and linux-s390, you'll
get messages to linux-s390 in a charset which is a superset of ASCII.

This is true also for ISO-8859-1/windows-1252 , but I don't see anybody
complaining ...

--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir

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