[Mailman-Developers] Re: (Fwd) Re: [Mailman-Users] Re: How to rem

[Brad Knowles]

At 10:09 AM -0400 2004/04/05, John A. Martin wrote:

>                                                            There are
>  for example at least three such header fields in this message apart
>  From the well defined Content-Type field removal of which would
>  cripple the PGP/MIME signature on this mail.

	Mailman is already doing MIME bodypart stripping, based on 
content-type values, etc....  It doesn't take much of a stretch of 
the imagination to take that same type of mechanism and apply it to 
the RFC2822 headers as well.

>                                                There are other rfc2822
>  fields like Message-ID and Resent-* fields and more that should not be
>  deleted.

	Okay, add Message-ID to the list of standard headers that would 
typically be kept.

>  IMHO failure of a mailing list manager to comply with the MTA
>  standards with respect to header munging is an extraordinary step that
>  should require extraordinary justification.

	Is it such an extraordinary step?  IMO, that's the real point 
under discussion.


	There are so many clueless users out there that insist that you 
protect them from their own stupidity, and they seem to go out of 
their way to use products from certain companies (who shall remain 
nameless) which likewise seem to go out of their way to do extremely 
stupid and dangerous things based on input from sources that are not 
proven to be trustworthy.

	This is part of the slippery slope I was talking about.  At what 
point do you stop trying to fight the billions of lemmings that are 
running you over on a moment-by-moment basis, and you start trying to 
do something to protect yourself, your systems, and your users, 
against them?


	In a sense, this is also what spam and spam fighting is all 
about.  More and more people are insisting on senders that must meet 
ever more stringent requirements, before the connection or message 
will be accepted.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.