Published on: 2015-07-16T05:08:59+00:00
The email archive system "mbox" has been causing some emails to become lost in mirrors, as they do not appear in the archives. The attachment link for users of the web "archive" has stripped off the final blank line that was present in the original attachment, potentially leading to detached signatures failing. Warren Togami Jr. has disabled the obscure_addresses option for Mailman as it was ineffective in mitigating spam. However, a test message sent to check if mailman continues to break clearsign GPG signatures for messages containing e-mail addresses showed that the issue still persists. This problem has been reported on both web and mbox archives. An attachment named lost.c will not appear in the mbox archives, resulting in its loss to both mirrors and users who use the mbox archives as their source for local seeding or MUA access.On June 27, 2015, Jeff Garzik wrote an email stating that a minimum modification policy was needed to preserve digital signatures and make mbox archives useful. Another person named Peter agreed with this statement and suggested making the raw archives public for archiving as well. The email included a digital signature attachment from Peter.The bitcoin-dev mailing list has been experiencing issues with its archive, specifically with the "mbox" format. The archives are missing necessary headers for easy use by users' MUA's in their local environment. Attachments that are necessary for the context and archives of all lists are not included, resulting in wasted time attempting to post-process them into usable form. There are at least 15 instances of unescaped '^From ' in the "mbox." A user has requested that the full raw archives be provided in regularly updated [gzip/7z] mbox format to fix these issues. Message footers and subject prefixes are considered corruptive and space-wasting clutter that should be turned off. Gmane has changed the subscription of the previous list to the current list, but there is a gap in their archive at the beginning and last week of the archive. They have requested a link to a single mbox file archive that can be used to restore the list archive in its entirety.The need for a minimum modification policy to preserve digital signatures and make mbox archives more useful is discussed. The "mbox" archives are broken and not verifiable, resulting in valuable content being lost. They are also missing original headers necessary for fully replyable, threadable, sortable, searchable, context-preserving use by users' MUA's in their local environment, and do not include essential attachments. Additionally, there appear to be instances of unescaped '^From' in the "mbox." To address these issues, the full raw archives should be provided in regularly updated [gzip/7z] mbox format. Other mirrors, archives, analysis, journalism, and interfaces are useful, but they require pristine historical sources to seed from. The message footers and subject prefix should also be turned off as they are corruptive and space-wasting clutter.The members of the Bitcoin development community have expressed concern over the corrupt archives of the mailing list they use to communicate. They are requesting that the "mbox" format used for archiving be fixed and made available for public use as it is the most efficient way to preserve the list's history. Users have stated that attempting to prevent spam through this method is futile. Some users feel that message footers and subject prefixes should be turned off as they clutter up the email chain. It has been requested that the internet provide regularly updated gzip/7z mbox format archives to resolve these issues.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T14:05:44.137694+00:00