Subject: [CFRG] question on low message size thresholds for cfrg mailing list

From: Rene Struik <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 13:41:55 -0500

Dear CFRG Chairs:

[I presume you moderate the mailing list]

Is there a reason the CFRG mailing list has such a low message size 
threshold that my response (6194 characters) to Bjorn Haase's email 
(5676 characters) requires moderator approval (combined size: 11870 
characters)?

Not sure how message sizes are counted, but the "Message body is too 
big: 43066 bytes with a limit of 40 KB" seems to be somewhat at odds 
with the character count in the email exchanges themselves (or, does one 
use McEliece keys under the hood for cfrg mailing lists?)

I would like to suggest raising the limit to more reasonable sizes so as 
not to stifle discussion. Please note that non-cfrg recipients now will 
get the message, while mailing list subscribers are in a waiting cycle. 
I sent my message at 12:01pm EST today.

FYI - if with 11,870 characters of body text, one consumes 43,066 bytes 
of message body, this suggests that each byte is encoded using on 
average a 3+ byte-size string (an oddly high number for English language 
text consisting of printable characters).

Best regards, Rene

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 14:04:47 -0500

On 1/31/2022 1:41 PM, Rene Struik wrote:
> FYI - if with 11,870 characters of body text, one consumes 43,066 
> bytes of message body, this suggests that each byte is encoded using 
> on average a 3+ byte-size string (an oddly high number for English 
> language text consisting of printable characters). 

In the message I extracted the above text from, the body text was about 
30 lines out of a total of about 186 lines  (wc -> 186 lines, 10448 
characters) in the complete message.  The majority of the message was 
headers (and quite a lot of those were anti-spam headers).  That message 
was sent text only AFAICT.

In other messages to the list, both the text and html versions of the 
message are included with the HTML portion being a good 2x multiple in 
size of the text portion (for a total close to the 3x bytes you note).  
So it's not encoding, but overhead that's hitting you.

Strangely, I've got a message in my box from you to the CFRG mailing 
list 9/8/21 - Second RGLC on draft-irtf-cfrg-pairing-friendly-curves - 
that clocks in at 93.6 K according to Mozilla Thunderbird, so the 40K 
limit must be new, and I don't remember seeing any notice about it.

Mike

---

From: Rene Struik <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 14:16:41 -0500

On 2022-01-31 2:04 p.m., Michael StJohns wrote:

Hi Mike:

Thanks for troubleshooting. To my knowledge, my Thunderbird client is 
set to text. I do not know what Google adds to outbound messages, but 
was under the (perhaps false) impression that mailing lists somehow 
strip most headers without having actually checked this (I may give away 
my age here...)

FYI - My Sep 8, 2021 email (another review of the pairing draft) was 
also blocked (and I never saw it in my own inbox; I accidentally 
discovered it weeks later on the CFRG mailing list archive).

I sent my query on message thresholds, since I did not want the time 
spent composing my response go to waste.

Best regards, Rene

> In the message I extracted the above text from, the body text was 
> about 30 lines out of a total of about 186 lines  (wc -> 186 lines, 
> 10448 characters) in the complete message.  The majority of the 
> message was headers (and quite a lot of those were anti-spam 
> headers).  That message was sent text only AFAICT.
>
> size of the text portion (for a total close to the 3x bytes you 
> note).  So it's not encoding, but overhead that's hitting you.
>
> _______________________________________________
> CFRG mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/cfrg

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