[rpd] Unnecessary attachments

[Owen DeLong]

While I agree with Alan on the pointless and gratuitous waste of bandwidth devoted to this type of message format, I do have to point out that in this day and age, even in Africa, a message that remains less than 100Kbytes is unlikely to represent a significant issue, even at the scale of the rpd traffic on it's busiest days.

An occasional polite request to try and keep messages to plain text as much as possible should be all that is required here.

I think moderation and/or message stripping is excessive and unnecessary. It also carries the further disadvantage of preventing a network diagram or other such small infographic from being used when it would add clarification and perhaps avoid 100s of Kbytes of discussion and misunderstanding.

Just my $0.02.

Owen

On Jun 10, 2014, at 23:56 , Alan Barrett <apb at cequrux.com> wrote:

> Ignoring the merits of Badru's message itself, I'd like to focus on the
> structure:
> 
> 1 multipart/related [94K, 7bit]
> 2 |->multipart/alternative [7.5K, 7bit]
> 3 | |->text/plain [2.7K, quoted-printable, us-ascii]
> 4 | `->text/html [4.5K, quoted-printable, us-ascii]
> 5 `->image/png [86K, base64] A6B4555D-F867-4A2F-A9F9-BAF29039D12B[1].pn
> 6 text/plain [0.1K, 7bit, us-ascii]
> 
> The useful part of the message (the text/plain part number 3) is less than 3K.  The entire message is bloated to 94K by the inclusion of an unnecessary HTML part, and an unnecessary image. (The text/plain part number 6 is the footer automatically added by the mailing list software.)
> 
> I'd like it if the mailing list software automatically blocked all messages with attachments, pending approval by a moderator.  The moderator could delete unnecessary attachments, or simply ask the sender to try again without the attachment.  The moderator could approve messages with useful attachments.
> 
> So many people send unnecessary HTML messages that it's pointless to hold them for moderation.  I'd prefer to delete the HTML part and keep the plain text, but I won't object if the community prefers to keep both text and HTML.
> 
> --apb (Alan Barrett)
> _______________________________________________
> rpd mailing list
> rpd at afrinic.net
> https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo.cgi/rpd