Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

Hello Kirk and other moderators,

On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 10:01:58 -0400, Kirk Lowery <Kirk AT GrovesCenter.org> wrote:
> 
> When b-hebrew first moved from the University of Virginia to ibiblio.org
> where we are today, we chose to force all posts to be plain text. At the
> time, html email was new and there were a lot of nasty exploits that
> were being embedded in html email messages.
> 
> A couple of months ago something changed in the software system used by
> our list; all of a sudden some -- not all! -- incoming email messages
> were being silently discarded instead of being converted to plain text.
> I followed up with the kind help desk folks at ibiblio.org and tracked
> down what was happening. I'll pass over boring technical details, but in
> the end I was able to get the software to pass html email to the
> html->plain text converter. As you can see from the test emails, I was
> less than successful in solving the problem. I'm continuing to interact
> with ibiblio.org to see if we can nail down the problem. It's
> frustrating in that not all html email is handled incorrectly; as you
> noted, Gmail (which uses html extensively) comes through just nicely.
> 
> The best solution is to set your email software to send plain text --
> not html -- to b-hebrew. For example, my software is Mozilla's
> Thunderbird and it lets me set a default encoding for most email, but it
> also let's me set encoding on an individual basis. So in my address
> book, my b-hebrew contact has the option "Plaintext only" set. Or you
> can continue to use your gmail account as you have been doing.
> 
> The moderators are currently in discussion about the possibility of
> relaxing our prohibition of html email. The hard part is to evaluate
> what the level of risk is. What we might do is allow html email for a
> probationary period. If we do chose to change policy, we will inform the
> list.
> 
> Expect a decision by the end of the week.

This may be a minority opinion, but I would much rather that HTML mail
were *not* allowed in b-hebew (or other mailing lists for that
matter).

-- 
William Parsons
μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι.