Re: Android Replies to Git List getting rejected

From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Aug 7, 2012, 21:39 UTC
Message-ID: <20120807213938.GC3953@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAPZPVFZJkxK50eA+saMKLHAc=wCioTFF0PVw=Xhcrf3GpzPydA@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 05:25:02PM -0400, Eugene Sajine wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> <rant>
> Don't want to accept HTML messages - fine. But don't tell me which
> program to use for my email, especially when I'm sending totally valid
> message, so take my plain text message part and use it.
> </rant>

The problem is that HTML messages is a really good signal for SPAM and exploits sent by spambots trying to break into Windows machines. So from the perspective of keeping the vger lists spam-free, it works very well. Also, from a practical point of view, most of the mailers which send HTML also tend to mangle patches, and since most of the vger lists are very developer centric, having users use MUA's that mangle patches is highly unfortunate.

So having a hard requirement has been often useful for developers who, say, are unfortunate enough to work at a company that mandates the use of Lotus Notes, since it's a nice way to force the company to set up an alternate IMAP/SMTP infrastructure for developers who need to interact with the Linux Kernel community. Speaking as someone who used to work at IBM's Linux Technology Center, let me assure you there are some unappreciated, but still very valid, side effects of the current policies in force on vger.

There are other solutions to the spam problem, of course --- such as diverting all of vger's mail through Postini, which is uses the same anti-spam technology that GMail uses, and which is pretty good. (Far better than Symantec's anti-virus filtering service, which is what mit.edu uses, so I've had experience with both.)

But the tin foil hat community would probably be all suspicious about routing all of vger through Google's servers, even though pretty much all of the vger mailing lists are archived on web sites such as Gmane.... and truth to tell, the current solution which VGER has for filtering spam works pretty well, all things considered. It's rather unfortunate that Android-only GMail users are an unintended casualty.

						- Ted