From: rich@bofh.concordia.ca (Rich Lafferty) Newsgroups: concordia.test,concordia.dept.iits.help Subject: Re: Good, no more X-UNKNOWN... Date: 14 Jan 2001 22:17:04 GMT Message-ID: References: [Crossposted and followups set.] In concordia.test, Alexander Fong wrote: > On Sun, 14 Jan 2001, Alexander Fong wrote: > > > Test... > > For some reason, it was posting as character set X-UNKNOWN. Set to > > US-ASCII. Let's see if that works... > > Good, it worked. =3D\ Your newsreader is still trying to post in Quoted-Printable. (I mentioned this a while ago.) I suspect it might be being triggered by whatever you might have done here: > Alexander Fong (** -> @) ap_fong ** alcor =FA=FA concordia =FA=FA= Where one might expect to find a ".", you've got two 0xFA, which is certainly not ASCII! In ISO-8859-1, it's LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH ACUTE, which is probably not what you meant, but in DOS-LATIN-US (CP 437, the IBM box-drawing character set), it's MIDDLE DOT (a bullet point). I suspect replacing those MIDDLE DOTs with "." will solve the problem. If you want to use 8-bit characters in news, I'd recommend using only Latin-1 (unless, of course, you need characters outside of Latin-1, although I don't think box-drawing characters are a "need"); even then, it's not yet safe to assume that news is 8-bit clean, so US-ASCII is probably the best bet. If you want to use a munged address, I'd recommend the following: 1. Put something munged in the From: header, and have it end with ".invalid", which is guaranteed to never exist. 2. Put your real address, unmunged, in the .signature *and* in the reply-to. You might be surprised to hear that putting a legitimate address in the .signature and reply-to gathers no spam. The reason for this is found in the nature of the NNTP protocol and the manner in which spammers harvest addresses from Usenet -- it's possible to quickly retrieve all of the From: headers from a newsgroup from the overview database, while it's considerably more work to retrieve the full headers for an article, and much slower to retrieve the body text. Tests done by the fine folks in the net-abuse groups have demonstrated that spammers *do* only harvest addresses from overviews. Doing it that way also makes it convenient for people to reply to you. Interestingly, the Usenet Address Munging FAQ claims NOTE: DO NOT put a directly usable address in your sig, because many harvesters collect everything with an @ sign in it. which is empirically not the case. As an example of why address harvesters do *not* do this: If I were to request only the From: headers of one million posts, I'd get one million lines such as the following, with apologies to whoever this might be that I'm using as an example: 389115 testing "Pekka Ylonen" Wed, 03 Jan 2001 09:32:18 GMT 809 3 Xref: newsflash.concordia.ca misc.test:389115 (that's a single line broken for convenience). The typical text-only Usenet article is around 2kB and the average Usenet article including binaries is around 300kB. So, if you want to go through text-only groups looking to harvest addresses, overview gets you 192MB of data, of which about 1/8 will be email addresses, while retrieving full articles gives you 1.9GB of data, about 1/100 of which will be email addresses. If you go through an entire feed, overview gives you the same numbers (recall, we said one million posts), but article bodies gives you 300GB of data, about 1/20000 of which will be email addresses. Obviously, address-harvesting is most efficient from the overview, which only contains your From:. Give it a shot -- you'll avoid inconveniencing people that want to reply, solve your character set problem, and continue to avoid spam, while at the same time being a good Usenet citizen. Note also that since you're adding a Reply-To, you can put something as arbitrary as Alexander Fong in your From:, and since your real Concordia address is appearing at least once and probably twice in the message, you'll be staying within Concordia's rules which require the sender of messages to be identified. Hope this helps, -Rich -- Rich Lafferty ---------------------------------------- Nocturnal Aviation Division, IITS Computing Services Concordia University, Montreal, QC rich@bofh.concordia.ca -------------------------------