[Qt-interest] How to unsubscribe ?

[Sean Harmer]

Hi Scott,

On Wednesday 12 Aug 2009 10:20:26 Scott Aron Bloom wrote:
> > Srdjan Todorovic wrote on Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:37 PM:
> > > ...
> > > It seems that in many (all?) --
> >
> > Almost all ;) I think messages send through the NNTP gateway, under
> > certain circumstances (HTML formated mail?), *don't* have the list
> > information link.
> >
> > In fact, when you scan through the past few messages (e.g.
> > "[Qt-interest] problem in QWidget type cast") you'll see that quite
> > some posts actually don't contain that footer.
>
> All of them contain that footer. The footer is appended as an extra MIME
> part in the message.
>
> You just have to have a good email client to see it.
>
> Also, I'm trying to convince our list admins to force dropping of HTML
> parts.
> Text/plain should be enough. And messages with HTML only would be
> rejected.
> ----------------
> I've never gotten this fascination with plain text only....
>
> Seriously, besides the "wasted bandwidth" whats the big deal? Is there a
> mail reader out there that doesn't support it? Including creating new
> messages that embed responses correctly and generate new HTML fine?
>
> We waste more bandwidth answering non-QT C++ questions then the HTML
> overhead :)
Wasted bandwidth is just one of the problems. Another is the ability of the 
mailing list software to easily archive the mails for offline browsing and 
searching.

Yet another is security and information privacy. It is all too easy to embed 
malicious html (see [1] for e.g.) in emails that can leak information out to 
the web if your mail client is not capable of stopping this or is not 
configured to stop this. You are then also at risk of exploits targeted 
against your html rendering component when you are only reading email and 
might not be so aware of the dangers - many people still fail to grasp the 
dangers of malicious pages when using web browser.

> That said.. please note, its quite clear, there are a number of people
> here with FORCED signatures.. Probably setup by some IT control freak,
> who thinks that even email sent to a public list needs a confidentiality
> agreement :)
This is another common problem with corporate email, since getting the 
outbound MTA to append forced signatures etc also breaks digital signatures 
and/or encrypted messages as the message has been tampered with between the 
two endpoints. Stupid government regulations in some countries actually demand 
this (UK included although it is possible to put the required info into the 
message headers).

> Those are most likely going to be html (just based on the smaller fonts
> used in the sigs) AND the user would have no control over it.
Perhaps the mail list software can be configured to simply strip out the html 
content rather than rejecting the entire message?

Sean

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug