[Lowfer] Lowfer Digest, Vol 237, Issue 1

[Doug Reed]

Hi John.
There are no moderators on the LOWFER list, just me, the list-owner. And I
don't do anything more than ignore rejected spam emails that come into the
list. If I see an alert for a rejected email from a valid list member, I
will manually have the list software send a reject notice so the list
member knows why the message disappeared. I will usually not bother to do
that more than 2-3 times for that member. All remaining scrap goes in the
bit-bucket. Unless there are secret moderators supplied by qth.net,
moderation is not the problem.
What does happen fairly often is an attachment plus message body will
exceed the 50KB message limit. The list software will strip at least some
of the email HTML formatting and fonts but the fault is usually the
attachment. It is certainly easy for a screen capture or image file to
exceed the 50KB size limit. I really don't expect the message itself to
exceed a couple KB but if the attachment is 49,750 bytes you could easily
exceed the 50KB limit if you forget to trim the message content. As far as
I know the list software has no mechanism to automatically shrink image
attachments, the sender has to do it.

The only other problem I've seen is when the incoming message comes from an
email address that doesn't match the member list. I specifically had this
problem myself when using an email forwarding address. The list software
doesn't use the text based FROM address because that is easy to spoof by
spammers. I believe the list software takes the member address from the
internal email headers when approving incoming mail. My solution to the
email reflector problem is to use the subscribe-unsub email address for the
LOWFER list, not the membership submission form on the info page. That way
the list software figures out which email address it wants for
membership....

I also note that you have two member email addresses. Your w1tag.com
address is set to "nomail" which means the list will accept incoming email
but not send anything to that address. Your charter.net email address is
fully active for incoming and outgoing email. I kind of remember making
that change when you had trouble several years ago. The w1tag.com email is
the one I'd worry about unless you run your own email server. If you are
buying email service from some provider it is too easy for them to make
header changes that might invalidate the member address the list is looking
for. Google kept doing that to me with remailer messages so I now just use
my direct address for my forum subscriptions.... Try sending some test
messages and find out.

73, Doug Reed, N0NAS.