X-Message-Number: 14327 Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 23:53:52 -0400 From: "Kevin Q. Brown" <> Subject: Re: A few suggestions In CryoNet message # 14318, George Smith said: > (1) Would it be reasonable to have a limit placed on the > length of messages posted? George, For mailings to the entire mailing list, the CryoNet software limits individual messages to 40,000 bytes. A message larger than that is not included in the daily digest, but instead results in a brief note in the digest that explains how to retrieve the entire message from the CryoNet archives. Retrievals from the archives via email to "" or via WWW do not have that 40,000 byte limit. You may think that allowing 40,000 bytes is too generous, but others may think that it is not generous enough, since it occasionally has resulted in the excision of long, but thoughtful, essays from the digest. The main reason for any size limit is to reduce the likelihood of accidentally sending a large file to the mailing list. (Yes, occasionally people do send accidental multi-megabyte messages to mailing lists.) Admittedly, 40,000 bytes is an arbitrary limit, but it seems about the right size to me and I am not ready to change it yet. FYI: The CryoNet software has other automated filters besides this size limit. (1) Messages are truncated upon encountering base64, HTML, or uuencoded attachments, none of which are easily readable in a digest. (2) Postings to CryoNet must be from subscribers to the list (or from addresses listed in a special auxiliary file for people with more than one email address). This has been extremely useful for filtering out spam! (3) A message with too many quoted lines is rejected, which helps prevent an entire CryoNet digest from being accidentally appended to a message. (4) Non-printable and hyper-ASCII characters are converted to spaces. ** Also, lines consisting only of a period are dropped since some mail programs interpret that as "end-of-message" and thereby truncate the digest prematurely. (5) The software usually traps subscribe or unsubscribe requests that are posted accidentally to the mailing list rather than sent to "". Also, any "quoted-printable" encodings are decoded into ordinary ASCII, even if that results in long lines. Unfortunately, too often my attempts to reformat long lines automatically only made the situation worse, so I gave up on automatic reformatting and had to leave the formatting task to the people posting to CryoNet. If you find that your message, when posted to CryoNet, has formatting that is difficult to read, please double-check the settings in your mail program; it probably can be trained to send simple ASCII messages that fit well in a digest. - Kevin ** See message # 5210 "CryoNet Feature #26", which concerns an incorrect implementation of a CTRL-Z (DOS EOF) filter. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14327