OpenEuphoria

Re: Rob: Mail Manipulation?

• Posted by "Juergen Luethje" <j.lue at gmx.de> Nov 02, 2003
• 484 views

Rob wrote:

> Rolf Schr=F6der wrote:
>> as far as I understand, your program ListFilter checks each e-mail
>> sent to the EUforum for several purposes: spam, offending speech, to
>> large, to avoid advertisements, ..., and so on. This is ok for me and
>> probably necessary.
>
> As I explained privately, ListFilter attempts to snip out
> Yahoo, Hotmail and other ads from messages. You recently
> started using a signature that is introduced by a long
> line of dashes, just like a Yahoo or Hotmail ad.

The standard delimiter between the main text of a mail and the
signature, is a line that only consists of "-- " (without the double
quotes), that is <dash><dash><space>. You can see it in this mail.
Good mail clients automatically put this delimiter into the message,
when you choose "Insert" > "Signature" (or something similar) from the
menu. With 'good' I mean in this context 'careing for international
standards'.
As we can see here, using another delimiter can confuse ListFilter, and
it probably will also confuse any standard mail client, that receives
the mail.
So Rolf -- and all others -- please use this, and only this delimiter
for your signatures! Thanks in advance!

> After several messages with that signature,
> ListFilter marked your address as one that
> sends ads. ListFilter was then sensitive to any long
> lines of dashes or underscores anywhere in your message,
> and recently it snipped some of them, including the line
> following. The algorithm is not perfect. 85% of people
> do not send ads with their messages, so they are marked
> as having "no ads" and ListFilter will normally leave their
> messages alone.
>
>>    But I'm not happy with your 'policy' handling mails sorted out by
>> ListFilter: NO e-mail should be published on EUforum manipulated by
>> ListFilter without clear notice that it has been manipulated.

That's exactly what I wrote some months ago.

>>    Moreover, instead of distributing a manipulated email on EUforum, I
>> would prefer that ListFilter returns the objected e-mail to the sender
>> with some information about the objection, to give him the opportunity
>> to send an enhanced, acceptable version for distribution.
>
> In the case of Yahoo, Hotmail and other free services,
> the sender does not have the ability to remove the ad.
>
>>    And: could ListFilter leave characters > 126 unchanged, or, in case
>> Topica is unable to handle 8 bit characters, replace them by i.e. the
>> '$' sign, so that everyone knows that characters > 126 were replaced?
>
> ListFilter makes no changes to individual character encoding.
>
>>    What is your and the other list members' opinion about this?
>
> I've added a quick kludge so long lines of dashes will no longer
> be snipped from your e-mails.
>
> Regards,
>     Rob Craig
>     Rapid Deployment Software
>     http://www.RapidEuphoria.com

Regards,
   Juergen

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