History and implementation status of Opportunistic Encryption for IPsec

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 02:27:38PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Mystery 0: DCB's postings to the list don't appear.  This is a
> long-time problem.  The admins are aware of it.  This same problem
> seems to afflict David Tilbrook.
> 
> Mystery 1: James Knott did not get the first message in the thread.
> It was mostly a forwarding of
>   <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2013-September/017533.html>
> 
> 
> Mystery 2: the archive has none of the messages in the thread
>   <http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.tolug/>
> 
> But I got the first message, and so did DCB.  More than that I do not 
> know.
> 
> Mystery 3: The mailing list software failed to add the usual footer
> properly.  One that includes the request:
> 	TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> If you look at the message (included below) you will see that the
> footer is added without consideration of MIME encapsulation.
> 
> The original message is multi-part MIME.  First part text, second part
> HTML.  But William's second message has the same disease and WAS read
> by James.  It too has the footer improperly added.  So this explains
> Mystery 3: don't use mime encapsulation.

The mailing list software is dumb.  It simply appents the footer as plain
text, with no concern for multipart, attachments, or anything else.
Of course given the footer and rules for the list is "No HTML", then
sending a multipart message already violates the requested rules, so
broken mailing list sofware that doesn't handle messages that break the
rules may in fact be considered not important.  No idea.  Apparently
majordomo2 is supposed to have a multipart compatible parser and be able
to insert footers in the right place.  I suspect ss.org is running
majordomo1 though.

For example vger's majordomo is described as:

    The Majordomo is configured with a set of filter rules which when
    triggered will send the email to "/dev/null".
    (List owner actually, but they are overworked elsewere, and use "d"
    button usually...)

    Usage of HTML in email -- even as an alternate format -- is considered
    to be signature characteristics of SPAM.
    Ignore this at your own peril!
    A collection of phrases/keywords which appear commonly at those
    bloody SPAMs -- in case it is a TEXT/PLAIN spam, and not HTML-SPAM...
    Message size exceeding 100 000 characters causes blocking. 

    See the actual Majordomo taboo expressions. 

Makes me wonder if ss.org happens to have any Majordomo taboo expressions
defined in a config file that might be causing DCB's messages to get
trashed.

> Mystery 4: the original version of this very message did not appear.  I've 
> changed the title and eliminated the quoting of the first message of this 
> thread.  So I hope this one gets through.
> 
> Here's the thread in my mailbox:
>  Wednesday  William Muriithi              (43K) [TLUG]: Fwd: [Cryptography] History and implementation statu
>  Yesterday  To: Toronto Linux Users Group  (3K) Re: [TLUG]: Fwd: [Cryptography] History and implementation s
>  Yesterday  James Knott                    (4K) Re: [TLUG]: Fwd: [Cryptography] History and implementation s
>  Yesterday  William Muriithi               (4K) Re: [TLUG]: Fwd: [Cryptography] History and implementation s
>  Yesterday  James Knott                    (4K) Re: [TLUG]: Fwd: [Cryptography] History and implementation s

Well I certainly saw the first message, and seem to recall seeing more
in that thread as well.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
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