A Plea for sanity when posting to this list.

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Sun May 15 10:56:18 UTC 2005


I can help posting a reply to this post, even though I have a feeling I
shouldn't :-)

On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 08:09:15PM +0100, David Marsh wrote:
>Anders Karlsson wrote in gmane.linux.ubuntu.user 
>> I dislike HTML messages when they are posted to a mailing list. If
>> they are sent off-list, they are something one can cope with.
>>
>> The GPG signatures I do not understand why you have a problem with.
>> Is it because you just do not know what they are for, or is there
>> another reason? A GPG signature will allow easy verification that
>> messages has not been tampered with or that they originate from the
>> person that apparently sent the message.
>>
>> Not allowing GPG signatures, or even complaining about them, is a bit
>> silly.
>
>It's because any form of attachment creates all kind of cruft (fore and
>aft) which a MIME-aware mailer would hide from the reader, but which a
>newsreader can't be expected to be aware of, making the message hard to
>read. I read all large lists via gmane as it would simply be too much
>information for me to deal with as 'mail', otherwise.

So, you propose that everyone else should accomodate your choice of
reading a _mailing_list_ in a _news_reader_?

I'm trying eally hard here to not go off ranting about this, as you
might be able to tell. (*Chewing my fist.*)

Out of curiousity:
 What MUAs have you tried for reading this mailing list?
 In what ways is gmane better than the MUAs you've tried?

>I can't see any real need for GPG signatures on an end-user mailing
>list. Certainly, I would expect security announcements on a security
>mailing list to contain ways for users to verify the authenticity of a
>message, but for an everyday mailing list, I don't think that's really
>necessary, and unfortunately, as you can see, it just ends up adding
>additional "mess". Agreed, it's nowhere near as bad as HTML posts, but
>it's in a similar vein..

Oh, it's not _only_ about verifying the sender. The reasons why I sign
_all_ my mails:

 - Using signing/encryption of emails is a good habit to get into.
 - People can verify the sender.
 - By signing all emails, also the ones I send to mailing lists, I make
   it easier for people to verify my public key. (They get a signed
   email, with me as sender, but my key isn't in their web of trust yet.
   Now, to increase their confidence in my signature they can use Google
   to find other mails I've sent, the more hits the more they can trust
   my signature.)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://magnus.therning.org/

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship
by patent law on written works.

Black holes are where God divided by zero.
     -- Steven Wright
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