On Sunday 08 March 2015 09:50 AM, Aanand Shekhar Roy wrote:
One concern here is that "Thread" is a fragile term in email. Unless you are planning on some form of message body analysis to group messages together, you are going to need to rely on the In-Reply-To and References headers of the incoming email, which can have its difficulties. If you are going to thread by something else, like the subject, you may find people making minor changes in the subject to bypass the moderation.
Yes, I agree ,but having a system that curbs this problem will not again be a very good solution, for eg. A thread regarding discussion on mailman2 can have the name of the thread "Mailman 2", and for mailman3, the thread will be named as "Mailman 3". Now ,it can also appear that someone has made a minor change to avoid moderation but it is not so.
Yes, exactly! So what do you think would be a solution to the problem Richard mentioned? You cannot simply say that we are are not going to use any such system since there are drawbacks of it.
We need a clear definition of what you mean by a "thread". What type of message would be a part of a thread and which all would be not? Is this kind of auto moderation system just based on subject lines and headers even reliable?
I would ask you to dig through standards and implementations in MUAs about how threads are actually created. And then answer the questions above.
First, these headers are optional, and some mail agents may not generate them, and more importantly, the subscriber can bypass this linking by creating a reply as a "new message" thus bypassing the auto moderation.
Since I wish to implement this system as a plug-in it will be optional for the list admins and having an MTA that generates headers can be kept as a requirement.
It isn't a good idea to impose a restriction on MTA to use a plugin. Even this very email of yours was not listed under the same thread in my MUA (thunderbird) for some reason I don't know.
Second, there is an unreliability in these headers as they will not necessarily reference the "start" of the thread, but may only list messages later in the thread, and to get your "Thread Name", you are going to have to keep a full history (for some period back) of messages and what thread you determined them to be in to figure out what thread this message is in.
What we can do is to remove general keywords like "Re:[ ]" and "Fwd:[ ]" from the thread and then add to the database, so we don't need to store all the history, just information about last one does the job, we check that through Table1.
How do you know where does the thread started from the information in your table?
This means that any system that ties to limit the rate "in thread" must also have a similar (but perhaps different value) limit on total postings or creation of new threads.
We do not aim at limiting threads or posts on a thread we are just slowing it down to provide room to other users. If we decrease no of posts on a thread it might affect the discussion going on as some threads are very long and also important and can't be shortened.
I don't understand the use case of "slowing" down the delivery of emails at all. Why would someone want his email to be sent to the list a later time? What does "provide room to other users" mean in this context? How is one person sending a lot of mails stop others from doing the same?
-- thanks, Abhilash