"Message has a suspicious header"

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 12:53 +0000, Pete Batard wrote:
> OK, then I guess I will have a problem with that for the following reasons:
> 
> 1. The error is too vague.

Yes. It's a misfeature of mailman that it doesn't allow you to
automatically get notified of the reason when your post matches one of
the filters. The idea is that the list moderator will then tell you
explicitly what the reason is, if your post is rejected.

> 2. Since I tend to use thread-hijacking on regular basis to reframe 
> existing discussions, 

Yes, this is quite common. It's customary to end up with a subject line
containing something like (was: Re "Message has a suspicious header"),
which would be perfectly sufficient to satisfy the filter. And of course
the final decision is with the list moderator anyway. This isn't
automatic rejection; it's just being held for moderation.

> 3. The choice of implementing it should really be up to the list 
> administrator(s) (which it possibly already is, in which case the points 
> I make will be aimed at the libusbx admins, though my guess it is not) 
> and not the hosting provider.

It is up to the list admins. I've set up the list like all the other
lists I run here, for simplicity, but they are quite free to change it
as they see fit.

(If I were to fix #1 as I often wish I had time to do, that would
probably be done outside mailman and thus might be non-trivial to make a
per-list setting, but I'd try.)

> 4. While a subset of people may use thread-hijacking because they are 
> "lazy", others may see very legitimate use for it such as reframing a 
> debate or going on a tangent *while* wanting to ensure that readers of 
> the new thread can find out very precisely where the tangent originated 
> from.

You're absolutely right that this happens. Nevertheless, it's rare
enough, and especially it's rare enough to see it *without* the original
subject line being preserved as I mentioned above, that it normally
hasn't been an issue for such messages to require manual approval.

> 5. The first duty when implementing a mailing-list should be with 
> fostering as much contribution as possible, rather than exclude it. This 
> means, the less you restrict a subscriber's ability to post, the better.

Yes and no. We do try to do some spam filtering, and barring all HTML
goes a long way towards achieving that. And, of course, you shouldn't
necessarily bar non-subscribers from posting. It might make sense to
have a lower standard of filtering for subscribers. Patches to mailman
would be most welcome :)

> Else, one might find that some very insightful posts were prevented for 
> pure arbitrary restrictions.

One might. However, years of experience has taught me that in the
*general* case, the idiots who hijack threads, top-post and send HTML
are the very same idiots who can't string a coherent email together and
whose drivel is barely worth reading. That is, of course, a
*generalisation*. But it is a very real correlation.

Again, there's no reason for the list admins to run their list the way I
run mine; I only copied the settings over as a starting point for them.

> 6. Finally, if I wanted to take a jab at the "lazy" contributor quip, 
> and if the restriction is implemented at the software level, I'd say 
> that, from an external perspective, mailing-list software that prevents 
> thread-hijacking very much seems to be due to "lazy" developers, who may 
> have found that allowing such a feature would result in additional work 
> for them, and therefore chose to disable it. At the very least, if the 
> goal is to prevent new threads that may or may not be relevant to an 
> existing discussion from appearing in the middle of it, since human 
> processing of header + subject can easily figure this out, it must be 
> possible to automate such a task. Therefore the one reason not to 
> include automation that allows thread-hijacking may very well be because 
> someone didn't want to spend time implementing it...

We *have* automation which allows thread-hijacking. Posts which look odd
are trapped for moderation and then a manual decision is made as to
whether the post should be accepted or rejected.

I suspect your post just hasn't been moderated yet?

-- 
dwmw2
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