XSF Discussion - 2019-01-18

Does MAM explicitly define what happens to an archive if the address for which the archive is kept disappears (eg: a MUC room gets destroyed)?

Deleting the archive seems logical, but might mess with locally stored archives?

> This is going to break PM archival on the user account, right? Muc pm will end up in the user archive not in the group

But when you query the user archive, how do you know who was the owner of that nickname at that time?

You don't

Is this bad?

In the scope of how terrible muc pms are in general I mean

No.

From a pragmatic point of view, you can't tell who is the author of any given message in a semi-anon MUC anyway, so scoping LMC and MAM to "identities" is pointless.

If you want to make lmc work in PM (personally I'd say f*ck it who cares about muc pm) I'd relax the rules and match only by full jid and id. Because for PMs it's hard for someone else to guess what id you used

Contrary to group chat messages where the new guys sees the ids

Daniel: I'd say "match LCM on full JID and ID in MUCs as well, because you don't know who was the original author, so why should you enforce who the editor may be"

Future historians will look back at this point in time and define it to be where the anarchy started.

I wonder how many clients still didn't fix that.

I think a bot that joins mucs and than randomly changes messages from people who are no longer joined to 😂 is against user expectations

what about a bot that joins MUCs with a recently deceased nickname and floods the MUC with garbage? Or with some NLP based random sentence generator trained on MUC logs of that specific nickname?

Imagine a bot that be-rants this MUC about how bad everything this, in my name.

We assumed that Ge0rG already is such a bot, Ge0rG 😉

Guus: no way! BTW, did my trademark-related email reach you under the board address?

no?

Awesome.

Guus: I assume you received peter's response to my initial email because he's subscribed to board@

Communicating with board is kind of hard if everybody is blocked.

The last message I received on the subject is Peter's response on Fri, 11 Jan 2019 11:34:48 -0800 (PST)

I think that the policy for the board mailing list is in place to allow for private discussion - but I'm actually unsure. ralphm ?

Guus: I've responded to that yesterday, also considering the Board feedback.

Ge0rG I did not receive that. I'm unsure if anyone did, unless you cc'ed individuals.

you didn't get a bounce or any other indication that there was a problem?

Guus: I sent it to peter, with ralphm and board in CC, and got no bounces

I'm unsure what the intended behavior is, but it worries me that things disappeared in a black hole, without notification.

Can someone from iteam comment? ( Kev intosi MattJ )?

iirc that is the case, but I've never had anything to do with the mail server and lists so I'll defer to someone who actually knows

Ge0rG as I'm interested in what you wrote, can you forward it to me individually?

Guus: bounced to your gmail

I received it 0 minutes ago.

it is intended AFAIK because mailing lists get loads of spam

so you drop evevrything from unsubscribed because moderating this manually requires 10-30mins of work each day

no bounce?

yes

the proper way™ to do this is to reject the incoming mail

so that the originating server will do the bouncing

but email is the most hysterical of infrastructures, so you can't have nice things.

anyway, this is not the first time that my attempts to contact board are null-routed. Must be some kind of tarpitting or shadowbanning or howitscalled.

It is as Jonas describes it. Everything from a non-member of the list is dropped.

can we reject that instead, as Ge0rG describes? A silent drop causes confusion.

Not really.

That's a great way to get us on blacklists.

Because email.

after 20 years of xmpp, shouldn't there be something like a replacement for mailing lists?

reading this discussion is weird?

!

the xmpp guys are unable to communicate

It doesn't have to replace everything

Guus, rejecting email causes backscatter, which is a huge problem when the source address was spoofed in the first place. essentially, you become a more-or-less open relay :(

We have XMPP blogging already, and it could be used with email gateway.

PubSub discussion groups isn't a thing already?

I would prefer to use some kind of XMPP forums instead of mails, indeed

goffi, so yet-another-thing which tries to interface with email and will fail horribly?

just like discourse does

the only thing which reasonably interfaces with email is github, actually

jonas’: why would it fail ?

goffi, because interfacing with email isn’t as trivial as people think. e.g. threads

we can map threads with XMPP blogging.

That's something I have in my head for long, I'm hopping to do a proof of concept in the coming months.

jonas’: maybe I'm misunderstanding the tech, but how exactly does *rejecting* email (as opposed to accepting it and then sending a bounce) cause backscatter that anybody can make *you* responsible for?

It wouldn't, but that's not possible with mailing list thingies.

Wait, a mailing list thingie that's configured to only accept mails from members can do that, right?

In theory or in practice?

What we could maybe do is accept members from the members list as allowed to send to board. I seem to remember Mailman supports that.

Kev: it depends on whether we are talking about envelope-from or inline from.

With @list syntax, apparently.

“Another way to deal with this is to use the @Listname syntax to add the other sublists to accept_these_nonmembers of each sublist.”

Kev: does that help?

Apparently the mailman developers didn't understand the finesse of mail rejection a decade ago.

Ge0rG, no, mailing list delivery happens too late

you’d have to do that while the SMTP connection from the origin is still open, which is not how that happens

jonas’: this is an excuse.

if you can reject a message based on a heavyweight perl-based bayesian framework check magic, while the smtp connection is still open, you surely can do it based on a small list of whitelisted addresses.

Ge0rG, can you actually do that?

it only didn't happen because of lazyness, ignorance, or -EBUSY.

all SA deployments I’ve seen do not reject but only classify

(for the reason that it’s hard)

(and that you might not want to reject based on bayes alone, actually)

jonas’: it's only hard because MTA configuration files use arcane syntax that's incomprehensible to mere humans.

I'm sure they accept patches

ITYM because mail is a complex problem, like IM.

jonas’: I'm not complaining about prosody syntax. Except for the VirtualHost directive being an implicit scope for everything that follows.

jonas’: you won't solve a complex problem by exposing an even more complex configuration file format, and forgetting to document it.

hm?

which software are you even talking about? :)

the mail server

jonas’: my personal experience is with postfix, but I've horrible memories of sendmail config, and no positive memories of exim

postfix is not that bad

Ge0rG, postfix is well documented though

Ge0rG: sendmail config with or without m4?

jonas’: my master.cf contains three different invocations of `smtpd` with different parameters, which I cargo-culted from the internets and don't have the slightest clue about why they are there. It mostly works.

jonas’: so far I didn't find a single HOWTO that tells you *why* you have to paste them in and what they mean, only snippets that you are supposed to copy verbatim.

goffi: good luck with FOSDEM! :)

I would like to get an account on wiki.xmpp.org. Can someone help me?

melvo: please state your desired username in CamelCase, your email for the password transmission and an optional realname; here or via PM

melvo: in case you are the melvo who tried to contact me yesterday and today, please use xmpp:georg@yax.im as that other JID is for my private use and not supporting OMENNO encryption.

I'm also on the verge of leaving mobile network coverage for the weekend. Sorry.

> melvo: in case you are the melvo who tried to contact me yesterday and today, please use xmpp:georg@yax.im as that other JID is for my private use and not supporting OMENNO encryption. Yes, that was me. OK, thanks.

Ge0rG: thanks, there is a bunch of things to do :)

The summit banner on xmpp.org is covering up the hamburger menu on mobile devices...

https://upload.yax.im/upload/-F51Cgj4n-CGEZPR/Screenshot_20190118-192547_Firefox.jpg

Web \o/

Ge0rG, no hamburger for you.

Ge0rG: you can copy some marketing phrases for yaxim from that

ta: I'd rather not. Maybe they are trademarked...

Yaxim, mastering the most secure messaging system standard.

ta: what are the less secure *standards*?

maybe talk

twsting