On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 10:44:11AM +0100, Martin Peikert wrote:
Hello,
Erik Hensema wrote:
Never EVER refer to the headers of a message. It's a pure and simple fact that users can't (or won't) read them.
if so, WTF are they doing here? It's a security mailing list and if a subscriber cannot or won't read a mail header, how do you think that person will secure a box? IMHO they got to learn how to use the tools they are playing with.
Maybe they came to the conclusion that they indeed were not fit to secure a box, and wanted to unsubscribe... Anyway, I don't like that arrogant attitude of yoursi (and others on the list, I am by no means targetting specifically you). You once were a beginner too. Everybody was. Everybody here has made the same stupid mistakes as the other (possible me a little more than the others). Please give beginners the opportunity to actually learn something, instead of being rude to them. Phrases like 'go read the man page' won't help, and 'go read the headers of the mail' won't help either. It's something I'd expect from a Debian mailing list, not from a SuSE list.
And rightfully so, because headers aren't meant to be read by users.
s/user/lamer/g
Headers are for mailservers, mailclients and admins only. Not for users. Really. Let me tell you (/me looks in the general direction of the list) a story about mail headers. I am the secratary of the Spamvrij.nl Foundation [1], a Dutch anti-spam organisation. We encourage people to forward all Dutch-language spam they receive to us. On our site we've got a long explanation on how to reveal the headers of a mail message to the user, yet we still receive quite high a percentage of submissions without the headers of the spam. Now this list expects the users to read the headers without any help. I am not at all suprised that that doesn't work. The sollution is very simple: simply point them to the help message. People who do know how to read headers will do so anyway, so mentioning headers in the mailinglist footer only confuses beginners. [1] http://www.spamvrij.nl/en/ -- Erik Hensema (erik@hensema.net)