add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Incidentally, speaking about encapsulating messages in an
> application/news-transmission Content-Type for the moderation process,
> how could we advance in that subject?

My suspicion is that what Usenet moderation that remains is done with a
wide variety of hand-written bits and pieces.  STUMP was the closest to a
standard toolkit and it was quirky and a bit odd and I don't believe it's
been maintained in many years.

That makes it fairly hard to change anything, because so much of this
stuff is happening in maintenance mode and there aren't a lot of resources
for replacing or changing software.  Hence pursuing some sort of opt-in
feels like the only way forward, but that raises the question of how to
distribute that configuration.

There's also the aside that this doesn't feel like the most important
problem to solve with Usenet moderation.  Relaying messages to moderators
in a way that doesn't get them filtered out as spam is probably the most
severe issue, and I'm dubious encapsulation would help much.  (Not using
email at all is probably the only real solution, but that's a whole other
set of problems much more daunting than adding encapsulation.)  And of
course there are the standard Usenet security problems that make
moderation very easy to bypass (and which some moderated groups rely on).

Distributed systems design with permissions and a security model is hard!

> I can open a new thread in news.software.nntp; I'm wondering whether
> there currently are moderating programs which gracefully cope with that
> kind of encapsulation.

My recollection is that there were not back in the day, and it would
surprise me if any became capable of this in the meantime.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
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