Re: "This bug report will be sent to the Free Software Foundation..."

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, January 21, 2001 at 13:22:57 (+0200), Eli Zaretskii wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: "This bug report will be sent to the Free Software Foundation..."
>
> Sending email exposes the sender exactly as posting a news message.  No 
> more, no less.

Literally, yes.  Practically, no.

Unless the user is familiar with the GNU Mailing lists and the fact that
the bug reports got to thos lists, they may not even be aware that
anyone outside of the FSF will see their report.  After all the current
message says explicitly that the report will be sent "to the FSF", and
no hint is given that it's really a public mailing list with world-wide
distribution *and* cross-posting to usenet.

Furthermore even though a public mailing list is indeed very public,
unless it's readily available on various search engines (in the case of
bug-gnu-emacs this is true, but this is not generally true of all public
mailing lists), it's not nearly as widely indexed and searchable as even
a GNUsenet posting.

The current message in the top of the bug report form is indeed
misleading because it makes assumptions about the above items which may
very well be untrue.

There's also the little issue of just how likely it is that the user
trying out the bug reporting stuff will understand written English.  If
there's any part of Emacs that absolutely requires internationalisation
and translation into the languages of every user, it is this message!  :-)

> (Also, I think the link between gnu.emacs.bug and the mailing list is 
> on-way only, from the news group to the list, but I might be mistaken.)

Unfortunatly not -- at least not unless it changed very recently.  I get
lots of Usenet spam that's been cross-posted to the gnu.* groups and
then forwarded through their associated mailing lists.  Luckily they
always come through with full Usenet headers, including the NNTP headers
which are a lot harder to forge these days, and often they even include
a header saying which newsmaster contact should get the compliant!  :-)

For example, this cancel message came through today (though I've no idea
why -- I thought the gateway was supposed to suppress cancels!):

        Received: from fencepost.gnu.org([199.232.76.164]) (1911 bytes) by 
whome.planix.com
                via sendmail with P:esmtp/D:aliases/R:inet_hosts/T:smtp
                (sender: <bug-gnu-emacs-admin@gnu.org>) 
                id <m14KZwC-001z1Cb@whome.planix.com>
                for <woods@planix.com>; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 00:54:44 -0500 (EST)
                (Smail-3.2.0.108 1999-Sep-19 #1 built 1999-Oct-7)
        Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=fencepost.gnu.org)
                by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1 (Debian))
                id 14KZvZ-0006Mt-00; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 00:54:05 -0500
        Received: from senator-bedfellow.mit.edu ([18.181.0.25])
                by fencepost.gnu.org with smtp (Exim 3.16 #1 (Debian))
                id 14KZtP-0006Lv-00
                for <gnu-emacs-bug@prep.ai.mit.edu>; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 00:51:51 
-0500
        Received: (qmail 7900 invoked by uid 32); 22 Jan 2001 05:51:50 -0000
        Message-ID: <87wvbof80j.fsf@netris.org>
        MIME-Version: 1.0
        Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
        Sender: bug-gnu-emacs-admin@gnu.org
        Date: 22 Jan 2001 00:52:44 -0500
        Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
        From: mhw@netris.org (Mark H. Weaver)
        Organization: GNU Project
        To: gnu-emacs-bug@prep.ai.mit.edu
        Subject: cmsg cancel <87zogkf9zl.fsf@netris.org>
        Control: cancel <87zogkf9zl.fsf@netris.org>
        Lines: 1
        NNTP-Posting-Host: 43-2-62.dynamic.lcs.mit.edu
        X-Trace: dreaderd 980142710 471 18.43.2.62
        Errors-To: bug-gnu-emacs-admin@gnu.org
        X-BeenThere: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
        X-Mailman-Version: 2.0
        Precedence: bulk
        List-Help: <mailto:bug-gnu-emacs-request@gnu.org?subject=help>
        List-Post: <mailto:bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
        List-Subscribe: <http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnu-emacs>,
                <mailto:bug-gnu-emacs-request@gnu.org?subject=subscribe>
        List-Id: Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
                the Swiss army knife of text editors <bug-gnu-emacs.gnu.org>
        List-Unsubscribe: <http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnu-emacs>,
                <mailto:bug-gnu-emacs-request@gnu.org?subject=unsubscribe>
        List-Archive: <http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-gnu-emacs/>

Pretty odd that the cancel has a MIME-Version header too!  :-)

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>