[Buddha-l] Why some messages bounce

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 10:01 +0700, Chris wrote:

> It has been my (recent) experience that, if a message is 'bounced' it
> first gets delayed 'for consideration by the Moderator' and, if after
> that consideration it is rejected, a notice of rejection is provided
> complete with a rather detailed description of the reasons why - and
> an option of contacting the list-owner directly.

The mailman server is now set so that when people first subscribe their
account is set so that all their messages are moderated. After a person
posts a few messages, our custom is to change their account to let them
bypass moderation. Almost everyone who has posted more than a couple of
messages is posting unmoderated; if this is not the case, it is because
of my carelessness, not because anyone is being punished or is not
trusted. Even without moderation, buddha-l is one of the best-behaved e-
mail discussion groups I have seen.

In the interest of keeping our archives at a reasonable size, I have set
the size limit of a single message at 10K. That is a very generous
limit. One can write a very long message and still be well under 10K.
The reason to have a limit is to weed out HTML code, and the main reason
for doing that is to prevent the transmission of viruses that can be
concealed in HTML coding without the sender even knowing it. The
experience of the e-mail community over the past decade has been that
HTML coding is bad news, and most servers try to restrict it. Please
note that even if you are unmoderated, your message will be blocked and
submitted to moderation if it is over the 10K limit.

Almost all e-mail clients allow users to set their e-mail program to
send out plain text (also known as plain ASCII) without no HTML code
whatsoever. So most of you can disable HTML in outgoing messages. It has
come to my attention that AOL does not have any means of preventing
outgoing HTML. And I am beginning to think that gmail suffers from the
same unfortunate shortcoming. Since quite a few of you use AOL or gmail
and apparently have no means of disabling HTML, I have reluctantly set
the size limit to 20K.

If you use AOL or gmail, it is especially important to follow the
standard e-mail etiquette of trimming out all of the message you are
responding to except the little bit necessary to establish context.
Otherwise, you send an entire message back, one that everyone has
already read (or deleted). Not only that but the repeated message is
bloated with bulky HTML code. So please strive to cultivate the habit of
cutting out as much as you can of the message to which you are
responding. Consider not including that message at all. Just tell us
what you have to say.

-- 
Richard