Fedora List content, guidelines and antispam

James Wilkinson fedora at westexe.demon.co.uk
Wed May 25 12:50:20 UTC 2005


John Summerfied wrote:
> 2. Non-roman character sets implies the mail's not written in English or 
> any of the other European languages. If anyone writes to me it better be 
> in English because my French hasn't seen much practice since I completed 
> school 40 years ago, and I know no other languages, and English is in 
> any event the standard language for this list. Bouncing mail using 
> non-roman character sets means I get to not see lots of Chinese, 
> Japanese and Korean spam.

It ain't necessarily so.

Mutt, for example, comes configured by default to send in us-ascii if it
can, then iso-8859-1, and if it can't, to use utf-8. ISO 8859-1 doesn't
include the Euro sign, so it just takes someone to talk currencies, and
you're sunk. (That's why I've got iso-8859-15 in the list).

Ulrich Drepper (glibc maintainer) occasionally posts here. His signature
includes utf-8 characters, so you'll *never* see him. That is a loss.

Sometimes I will need to explain, again, just why we need UTF-8. Or
explain why a Greek rho is a different letter to a Latin P. I could
include all the ISO 8859 variants on the list: these days, programs are
more likely to understand UTF.

And in any case, you will be rejecting people whose only crime is to
write their names properly.

As Paul says, there is *very* *very* little spam on the lists.

You have the right to bounce mail based on whatever characteristics you
choose. But this *is* a Fedora list. There were good reasons why Red Hat
went UTF-8 back whenever it was. And good reasons why it's here in
e-mail. So I would recommend you don't bounce UTF-8 on the list.

James.

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