[tor-dev] Email Bridge Distributor Interactive Commands

[Matthew Finkel]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 04:01:34PM -0400, Israel Leiva wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I support what Philipp and Nima say about keywords. The given commands
> surely look simple for technical users, but what about non-technical users?
> If the purpose of the distributor is to give info, and you're already
> filtering emails to *try* to avoid fake requests (correct if i'm wrong),
> then you may assume that if somebody sends you an email is because he/she
> is requesting for info, and if the email contains "bridges", it's quite
> possible he/she wants bridges, right? You could, for example, filter for
> "transport" (ignoring case) and send a reply with info for all types,
> explaining what they do, and let the user decide which one to use. You
> could also send both ipv4 and ipv6 IPs when requesting bridges. And why not
> sending a public key link in all the replies (except help)? IMHO, this
> reduces the effort on the user side (this is how we're doing it on the
> revamp GetTor project).
> 
> best,

I actually think your idea about accepting "[get] transport" as a valid
help request, returning a description of each supported PT, is a great
idea. We currently have some information about PTs on the website
distributor, but the email distributor is lacking.

I believe we are also planning on signing every email (soonish?) and
will provide the same footer as the help message (if this changed,
then we should change it back).

We also do try to discard fake requests, isis actually added another
yesterday!


Basically, what I've gotten from this thread is that the email
distributor is doing an Okay job right now, but if it was smarter
about how it parsed messages and made more assumptions about what
the user actually wanted then this would make it more usable and
could, possibly, make the world a better place. I think this latter
decision deserves a separate thread, so I won't sidetrack this, but
bring this back on-point, do you have any other suggestions related
to the current format of the email or of the flow?

Thanks for your feedback!