Re: Re Word Freqency analyzer

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from Patricia M Godfrey  Thu, 24
Apr 2003 14:30:34 -0400

> The verboten word was s-u-b-t-l-e-t-i-e-s ...

I just sent the list a message consisting of the verboten word on
single line, nothing else, and got the same bounce message you did.
There's no listproc command "subtleties", and the statement that the
"string matched" is plainly wrong.

Any listproc command can be truncated to its first three letters
(for example, SUBscribe XYWRITE ME@xxxxxxxx John Doe), and the
filter apparently bounces any message in which the first three
characters of a line correspond to a truncated command. (Hence the
problem with "subtleties"; it truncates to SUBscribe.) The
intention is good, but the net is cast much too wide, and it's
irritating when a perfectly good post is rejected for a spurious
reason. On the bright side, however, it doesn't happen often.
Ironically, the same overbroad algorithm fails to keep out the
annoying trickle of clueless subscription-related messages that
regularly find their way onto the list. "How do I unsubscribe?"
isn't bounced because the word "unsubscribe" doesn't start a new
line. AI it ain't.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/