[Coco] READ THIS about duplicates and HTML

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 07:39 PM 1/29/05 -0500, Merv Curley wrote:
>It is beyond me to figure it 
>out eg how maltedmedia applies to yahoo messages

This is all straightforward. We're a smart group so PLEASE EVERYONE READ THIS.

The user "ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com" subscribes to Maltedmedia.
The user "coco at maltedmedia.com" subscribes to Yahoo.
Maltedmedia messages go to the Yahoo 'subscriber' and so out to all Yahoo's
members.
Yahoo messages go to the maltedmedia 'subscriber' and so out to all
maltedmedia's members.
Duplicates are suppressed in the subscription.

The GMane newsgroup is gated to maltedmedia. (The GMane newsgroup was
created specifically as a double-opt-in, spam-free newsgroup to allow news
posting to be gated to the list.)
A message posted to Gmane goes to maltedmedia.
A message sent to maltedmedia goes to Gmane.
And because Yahoo and maltedmedia are mutual subscribers, any list post to
either Yahoo or maltedmedia ends up a Gmane, and anything posted on Gmane
ends up on both lists.
Duplicates are suppressed in the subscription.

This very clever system was the result of some good thinking on the part of
about a dozen people, and it works correctly: ONE POST GOES ONE TIME TO
BOTH LISTS AND THE NEWSGROUP. No duplicates.

But HERE'S HOW THE PROBLEM ARISES: If a member of any group sends a message
to *both* groups, the message is then gated from each group to the other.
The message *appears* to be a duplicate, but is actually a properly
forwarded copy of the original poster's mistake. It is a list member that
causes this. And doing a knee-jerk Reply-To-All will *continue* this
undesirable behavior -- so don't do it!

First moral: DON'T DOUBLE POST and there will be no duplicates.
Second moral: TRIM YOUR REPLY LIST TO ONE GROUP and there will be no
duplicates.

As to what started the discussion (the blank emails), it is a bug in the
HTML stripper in Mailman (which Maltedmedia uses, latest version) when
presented with problematic HTML from Hotmail. The bug has been posted at
Sourceforge and they are looking at the problem. In the meantime, the vote
was overwhelmingly to keep HTML off the maltedmedia list, so the stripper
stays in place.

Third moral: DON'T POST IN HTML and there will be no blanks.

Dennis