following up on this discussion of lists that allow pix...
On 12:17 PM 7/25/02, Jim Osborn wrote:
>On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 11:22:57AM -0400, Beartooth wrote:
>> I've always excluded pix from the lists I run manually...
>>
>> Are there any rules of thumb from people's experience as to
>> how much more bandwidth a list carrying pix eats, as compared to
>> one that excludes them?
>
>I can offer a small anecdotal data point: I run a medium-sized (I
>suppose) list, about 2K subscribers, maybe 100 of which actively
>post, maybe 10-40 total articles/day. I allow gif images, but not
>jpgs, as gifs are a lot more efficient for the charts that are
>appropriate for this list. However, I restrict the article size,
>including all attachments, to 15K, so they have to make that chart
>really count! My list gets relatively few images, maybe one every
>3-4 days. I don't allow html at all.
>
>I'm a member of another list devoted to the same topic that allows
>unlimited posting of anything, html, you-name-it. Some of the jpg
>charts on that list (that should have been gifs) can run to 400K, and
>I simply remove them at my ISP so they don't clog my fetchmail queue.
>I also strip the html off that list as I retrieve it.
>
>Even with my various prunings, and the fact that I tend to keep
>most of the content from my own list (for no good reason :), I
>find there's at least ten times the bandwidth on the unlimited list.
>I should mention that that other big list is quite well regulated,
>on-topic, etc. The posts tend to run: someone posts a chart and
>some discussion of it, then ten others chime in with text-only
>posts. Neither list is a "pix" list per se; it's just that often
>a chart is useful to help make the author's point.
I'm on several chatty hobby lists that allow HTML and pics (Yahoo Groups
hosted lists). On one list we have had more virus attachments in the past
few days than we have had actual on-topic attachments. I've tried several
times in the past to explain why posting pictures to a list is a bad idea,
that it leads to problems in the long run (like people automatically
opening pictures, except for when it's a virus instead of a picture...) and
been flamed for suggesting people post pictures to a webpage and then post
the URL instead of attaching the pictures.
So now we have tons of virus infected subscribers who have opened these
attachments, and the new virus posts are happening more and more and more
frequently. I bet this present round of viruses is going to make the list
admin think twice about this issue. My guess is that these lists are going
to not allow attachments at some point before the end of the year, that
they will HAVE to do this to stop all the virus posts.
A friend runs a distribution list, a monthly newsletter. Twice now I've
seen emails (on other discussion lists that many of her members are also
members of) that say "Jessica has a virus". No, Jessica doesn't have a
virus - Klez has picked up her email address and then sent a virus (with
the Klez forged headers falsely implicating Jessica) to someone that
happens to also be a subscriber of her newsletter.
Jessica actually uses a password when sending out her newsletter, so for
now she's safe, none of the present viruses will be able to grab her "from"
and actually send a virus laden file thru the newsletter distribution
list. But.... What happens when someone writes a virus smart enough to
take a message in your outbox and resend it, with a virus payload? If she
has one of the sent newsletters (with the password) in her outbox, and
catches the virus, then the virus *could* be sent to the entire newsletter
membership (which is thousands of addresses). So, for now, they are
changing the newsletter moderation to use a new address that is approved
for sending, and to change the allowed address with *each* mailing.
Of course, this is going to cause problems with recipients who filter on
the "from" unless the newsletter munges the from to some standard address
(which gets back to the falsely implicated virus emails).
The best thing is to not allow the list to send attachments, but even then,
if the recipient doesn't remember that this list doesn't ever send
attachments we are back to the forged virus headers falsely implicating the
innocent list manager.
I don't know if there's a good solution for this or not.
jc
References:
|
|
