[X-Newbies] Re: Your message to X-Newbies awaits moderator approval

[Robert MacLeay]

On 11/19/06 2:45 PM, "Steven Rogers" <srogers1 at austin.rr.com> wrote:

> On Nov 19, 2006, at 3:34 PM, Mark Gibson wrote:
> 
>> Can you perhaps send as plain text instead of HTML? That should
>> reduce the message size?
> 
> He probably could, but it seems like it would be a lot easier if
> posters (who are supposed to be Newbies, after all) don't have to
> worry about all that stuff to get a message through in a timely
> manner. If you're a first-time poster, then having your message held
> for moderation is to be expected - even if its excruciating to wait
> while your system is on fire. But message size seems like a pretty
> weak indicator of a legitimate vs. non-legitimate message.
> 
> SR

As is often the case, there is more going on here than meets the eye.

Brian's message did not seem to be that long to me, so I dumped it into a
word processor and checked.  It is only 1893 characters long!

But...

It's header is 3199 characters, for a total of 5092.

This is not atypical; I looked at the size of several other messages, and
all the headers are huge. Furthermore, a lot of it is administrivia added on
by themacintoshguy's server.

This is clearly a case for our listmom; a practical message limit of 1.9K is
ridiculous.