[Mailman-Developers] filtering extensions?
David A. Forsyth
pisTon@iwr.ru.ac.za
Tue, 5 Jun 2001 15:05:27 GMT+2
Hiya all
I've just joined in order to make a suggestion for futer development
of mailman.
Let me fill you in a bit...
I'm a programmer working in Delphi, and a network admin (Novell), AND
I have a hobby....
In the interests of the hobby (railways) I run a list using mailman
on a machine administered by someone else (a Unix guru of note).
My immediate problem is that multipart MIME encoded messages on the
list I run pose a huge virus infection threat to all the members
(apart form being just downright annoying to those who use mailers
that don't interpret them). I'm a member of some Yahoo groups and I
see that their list software trims off 'non text portions' of the
messages. In other words, it only sends on the plain text and dumps
all the rich text, text/html, ms-tnef etc bits of junk that arrive in
multipart MIME format.
So, I'm wondering if such filtering can be done by mailman so that
list members need not be troubled to reset the default encoding
schemes on their various flavours of PC, and yet be safe from
receiving virus's via the list.
(note my list does not accept images either, so filtering out ALL
attachments would not bother *me* in this application, yetis a
consideration for other lists)
For now, I've done a fiddle in the list settings by putting a check
for multipart MIME in the headers so I get to veto them as moderator.
Unfortunatly, the message sent back to offenders is a bit misleading
in that it says 'message contained a suspicous header' no matter what
rule triggered it. A possible extension to mailman is to allow
pattern specific messages and actions at this point.
thanks
--
Living in South Africa
Flying power Kites
Chasing 3'6" gauge trains
http://terrapin.ru.ac.za/satrain