[mdlug] List archive and long lines

[David Favro]

Wolfger wrote:
> Are you living in the early 1980's?  Waiting all day for 80k? I don't
> even wait a noticable amount of time for 1 Meg.
>   
Yes, but Wolfger, the net is not the same everywhere.  In
technologically advanced countries like Japan, South Korea, some
European countries, it is (so I heard) an order of magnitude better,
faster, and cheaper than in the relatively technologically backwards
country of USA.  Here in Vietnam, by contrast, I would venture to guess
that it is much worse than what Aaron must cope with in Iraq, especially
since the recent Indonesian earthquake took out all of our submarine
cable links to the outside world.  RTT to N. America over 3000ms and
packet-loss percentages of 50% or higher are not unusual.  Under these
conditions, TCP can become almost unusable, so I often have to resort to
custom protocols that I have developed to get data across.  This forces
me to make heavy use of remote proxies to "translate" since the
World-Wide-Web is currently typically only available over HTTP, which
was (not wisely, IMO) built on top of TCP.

Aaron Kulkis wrote:
>> I'm getting about 2 MB
>> of spam every day....somewhere around 300+  I definitely don't have
>> time to play html-clicky-reload-clicky-reload-clicky all day with
>> both the incoming box AND also the spam box (false positive spam
>> identification is far too frequent).
>>     
The reason why you get spam is almost certainly because you gave the
spammers your email address.  If you don't post a given email address to
web-sites, usenet, mailing-lists that get archived (like this one --
notice that I send from an address uniquely for this list so that I will
know if and when it gets harvested and can abandon it), use it to
register in commercial sites, etc., and ask your friends not to give or
sell you address to any spammers, you will get essentially no spam.  I
did it for many years, and I can vouch that it works -- no spam, period.

If you don't want to do that, and you are on the far side of a slow
link, aside from not using web-mail (a no-brainer), I recommend
prioritization at the server.  For example, keep a list of "whitelisted"
addresses, your friends, family, stuff that is most important, and
config the server to send that stuff first when you have that limited
time on the net, so that if you can't get it all across to Iraq or just
don't have the time to read, at least you get the most important.  Then
stuff like commercial mailings, this mailing list, unknown addresses,
etc.... finally, the very last stuff that you will get is stuff from
unknown addresses that *also* was flagged as spam by the generic
scanner.  At least any false positives won't be from "important"
sources, and you can wait to sift through the penis-enlargement adverts
when you *do* have time and bandwidth.

Finally, the best thing that we all can do about spam is to make it
illegal.  Bot-nets and international boundaries make it hard to
prosecute, but not impossible, if we can at least get some laws against
it (real laws, not that CANN-SPAM crap).

Wolfger wrote:
>
> Not to mention the filters I can apply, like "star"ing the e-mail if
> it's got an obvious reply to me (like your post did), so that, when
> I'm busy, I can attend to only the important e-mails. If anything
> webmail helps me process my e-mail faster!
>   
Agreed, but you can do all that stuff (plus a lot more) with a "real"
MUA also.