List administrators

You're probably here because you've noticed the address newman@archiveorange.com has been subscribed to your list. The sole purpose of this address is to receive mail intended for the archive -- mail sent there is processed automatically and will not receive a response. If you would like to contact us, use this address. There is some information on our service over here.

We take measures to protect your subscribers from spambots and mail address harvesters (incoming mail is filtered, and all mail addresses are hidden behind CAPTCHA images). If you do not wish to be archived here, you are of free to unsubscribe Newman from your list and request the list archives to be removed from the site, but we hope you don't! We hope you find this is a valuable service for you and your subscribers.

Recently we've also noticed that there is spam being sent which claims to be from this address (we get the bounces). These are forged and we're not sending them. The only mail that is ever sent from the archiver address are request messages for MLMs (i.e., subscription requests).

About

Newman is the mail handler for ArchiveOrange. He sorts mail by list, formats it nicely into a form that is friendly for human readers, hides email addresses behind a CAPTCHA image, determines thread structure (who replied to whom, and in what order), archives attachments, records statistics, and throws everything into a big database. All mail sent to Newman's address is first routed through Postini's spam-blasting service.

Threading

Newman deduces thread structure by inspecting the References and In-Reply-To headers of each message. A few threads are broken into pieces when they shouldn't be, and this is always a result of one poster (the first poster in the fragmented thread) using a mail client that doesn't set either of the headers mentioned above. A possible solution is to attempt threading by the message subject line, but among the problems this introduces is that introduces its own problems. The relevant document is RFC 822.

Quoted sections

Newman attempts to to locate quoted sections among messages and collapse them by default, giving you the option to view them if necessary. This saves space and makes the thread much more readable when it works correctly. Of course it is totally heuristic -- there is no standard for quoted reply sections (and if there were, it wouldn't be followed by anyone, just like every other mail standard isn't), and so there are cases where he makes mistakes in capturing either too much text as quoted, or misses the first line, breaks the quote into two sections, or recognizes something that isn't really a quoted section at all. The rule set he's using is a tradeoff; we've tuned this thing a fair amount and this is the best compromise we've found. Hopefully you'll agree that it's less awful than it could be!