GNU Mailman settings for this list

[Ian Kelling]

Dmitry Alexandrov <321942@gmail.com> writes:

> John Sullivan <johns@fsf.org> wrote:
>> I'm sorry about this, everyone. Daniel seems to have done some scraping and 
>> compiled a list of addresses on his own, from his libreplanet-discuss 
>> archives. This is the list he's encouraging people to BCC.
>
> Well.  At least, I hope his list would not be as broken technically as this 
> is used to be: before the last downtime it chucked out HTML parts, so 
> signatures became invalid.  When the issue was brought up half a year ago, 
> Ian Kelling <sysadmin@gnu.org> said he was about to look into it when doing a 
> upgrade [1].  And indeed, something changed: now it does not cut parts off, 
> but performs a lossy conversion to plain text.
>
> So a message composed with a typical out of a box MUA and passed through this 
> list now have *two* autogenerated parts: one by sender’s MUA and another by 
> gnu.org’s Mailman, which confuses subscribers [2].  Signatures are still 
> broken, of course.  My plaudits to anyone who came to that idea. :-D.
>
> (That’s besides everything else: mangling ‘from’ field, etc.)
>

Should Mailman convert text/html parts to plain text? Currently this is
set to "yes".

There's good and bad things about this setting. One bad thing is that
gpg signatures on html email will be rendered invalid.

For this list, I think its best to keep that setting on, because html
email is a risk of security, software freedom and privacy unless you
take very tech savvy measures against it, and this is not a list we
should expect that or expose people to that. Lots of people reading this
list like me, have their email client set to convert any html email to
plain text.

Mangling the from field happens when someone sends from a strict DMARC
domain (a newish email security standard that is not widespread),
because mailman modifies all messages to add the subject prefix and
footer, and by that standard, it has to change the From line. Plain text
conversion is also a message modification that requires the
change. Subject prefixes and footers provide valuable information,
especially to users who are not familiar with email lists, eg: someone
signs up for this list, new messages appear in their inbox, but they
can't tell its from the list or how to filter them or how to turn it
off. For users who are familiar with mailing lists, or are sending
patches, they should generally be turned off, and we are turning them
off for a lot of lists, but for this list, its more important to have
settings that are most helpful to new users.

I'm not sure, but the footer might also invalidate mime gpg
signatures. If that is the case, it means to send gpg signed mail to
this list, you need to send inline, not mime. And it will always need to
be plain text.

-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org