[Mailman-Developers] Enforcing plain text posting

[Daniel J. Cody]

Sorry a bit late to the party on this one, but a couple *very* simple
things I do to keep HTML/any formatting email off my lists is adding a
couple lines "Hold posts with header value matching a specified regexp"
textarea box on the 'Privary Options' section of your list administration
page:

Content-type: text/html
Content-type: text/enriched
Content-type: text/x-vcard
Content-type: multipart/alternative
Content-Type: multipart/related
Content-Disposition: attachment
Content-Type: multipart/mixed
Content-Type: application/octet-stream

those lines catch 98% of formatted messages and attachments from going to
the list. as the 'standard' rejection message on the admindb page, i have
something like, "Please do not post HTML/RTF formatted emails or
include attachments with your post. Please read thelist info and
guidelines available at http://foo.org/listinfo.html" and the 'reject with
the explanation below' radio button checked by default.

of course, there are better ways to do it which have been mentioned on
this list..

again, this is a *very* simple way to go about it and is adequate for
small - medium sized lists. ideally, it gets stripped automagically.

hth,

.djc.

On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, George F. Nemeyer wrote:

> - Lists frequently erupt into flames about posts in HTML.
>
> - MUA's will often respond to an HTML message by replying in HTML,
>   perpetuating the problem caused by an initial HTML post.
>
> - Even users normally posting plain text often slip up, particularly
>   when mailing from other than their normal host.
>
> - HTML needlessly eats up to 3 times the storage space for messages in
>   archives, worse if the message is in both HTML and plain text.
>
> Mailman needs an option to enforce plain text posts by detecting and
> rejecting posts in non-plain formats, particularly HTML.
>
> The sender should get a polite, canned note to turn off special encoding
> and re-format their posts in plain text.  The note should be customizable
> so that instructions might be included for how to do so for common MUAs.
>
> Please consider adding this feature.
>
> (I'd asked about this a long time ago, but I never saw any comment on it.)