[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Users] Re: MIME messages

[David A. Forsyth]

On  6 Jun 01 at 22:55, Les Niles is alleged to have scribbled:

> On Wed, 6 Jun 2001 18:29:23 -0400 barry@digicool.com (Barry A. Warsaw) wrote:
> >
> >[I've moved this discussion over to mailman-developers.  -BAW]
[]
> >So what I'm envisioning is an extensible architecture, a la the
> >message pipelines, where each filter is implemented in a separate
> >Python module, conforming to a particular, yet-to-be-defined API.
> >Mailman will provide a bunch of canned defaults, like
> >"strip-mime-leaving-only-text/plain" or "match-vbs-attachments".
> >There will probably be some kind of mix-in model for describing the
> >action to take when a filter module matches.
> >...
> 
> While a general and powerful mime handler would be nice, and is
> probably the right thing to do in terms of the long-term
> development, I think that one can get most of the benefit from a
> much simpler solution.  A few months ago I hacked together a mime
> handler with the goal of making the stuff that comes from Outhouse,
> AOL, etc. look like plain-text mail, as well as enforcing
> prohibitions on postings images and other binaries.  The handler is
> based on the mimetools library; it discards sections with certain
> mime types specified by per-list regexps, and removes multipart/*
> wrappers that become redundant after the stripping.  Nothing fancy,
> but it has cleaned up 95% of the crap on our lists -- mostly
> text/html but also the occassional image/* or application/*.
> (Ripping out text/html works because so far it's always accompanied
> by corresponding text/plain, except for contributions from
> spammers, the deletion of which is a feature.)

this is exactly what I'm looking for (as a user)!  (I started a 
thread on it yesterday)
as to the UI, I see a simple set of options like
( )  keep text/html
( )  keep image/*
( )  keep application/*
.
.

as a starting point at least.
the admin can select one or more of them.  with all of them off, only 
text/plain is kept.  if a message has no plain text portion, it is 
held for the moderator.

maybe some thought can also be given to filtering out hoax virus 
warnings?  I've put in a regexp on 'virus' in the subject which will 
stop postings for moderator approval, but as I said yesterday, the 
regexp matching is a bit limited in what it sends back to the user, 
being singularly uninformative.  some configurability would be nice 
there.... as in, when regexp x is matched, send message x, when Y is 
matched, send message Y etc.... instead of the blanket 'suspicious 
header' thing  (-:

>
[]
> pretty well.
> 
>   -les  les@2pi.org
> 
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