[Mailman-Developers] content filtering bug (text/html andtext/plain in multipart emails)

[Brad Knowles]

At 5:48 PM -0400 2005-07-03, Michael Dunlap wrote:

>  Developers- what was the reason for this behavior?  I don't believe this
>  was an arbitrary decision, so what unwanted events is it designed to
>  prevent?

	Features such as converting HTML to plain text, and stripping 
various bodypart types, have accumulated in the code over time.  In 
that time, some RFC-specific knowledge has been encoded in the 
resulting Python.  E.g., the fact that the first part of a 
multi-part/alternative is supposed to be the plain-text version.

	So far, the code has focused on doing just the simple things like 
stripping specific bodypart types and converting HTML to plaintext. 
So far as I know, no one has attempted to generalize this process. 
Without any firm evidence to back up my claim, I will say that it is 
my belief that doing so will be considerably more complex than the 
code that has been developed to date.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

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