[Mailman-Users] Archive Idea

[Phillip Porch]

On Sun, 19 Sep 1999, Listwrangler wrote:

> >And heck, it may as well be generalized so that you could perform these
> >actions on the main list as well (ie, don't send any application-msword
> >attachments ever)  :)
> >
> >  -Craig
> 
> 
> Yes, please! I forbid attachments to my lists because I'm sick of dealing
> with unopenable attachments, plus I always advise my users to never open an
> attachment they didn't request because it could contain a virus. And a lot
> of users are very rude or ignorant about sending giant attachments (we
> don't all have cable modems), or send garbled attachments that nobody can
> make any sense out of. And who do they ask for help? Me, of course. I have
> to periodically go through my inboxes and clear out all the unsolicited
> attachments that I have no intention of ever reading.
> 
> As far as I'm concerned, attachments are spam.
> 
One of the users on my system that helps me with mailing lists took I very
poorly written perl script that I wrote initially in response to the
happy99.exe crud and rewrote it in a much more elegant way. I then
challanged him to rewrite it in python and he again did so easily. These
scripts are designed to be called in a filter pipe. I have been using it
with sendmail... For example, if there was a list called test, my alias
would look like this:

test: "|/usr/local/bin/filter.py |/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post test"

The scripts were originally written for listproc but should work fine for
mailman. I'm still in the process of moving lists over.

Anyway, instead of posting attachments, I have made these scripts
available via ftp. These scripts may be used under the GNU General Public
License.

ftp://ftp.theporch.com/pub/misc/filter.pl.tar.gz (the perl version)
ftp://ftp.theporch.com/pub/misc/filter.py.tar.gz (the python version)

Enjoy and let me know if you notice problems. There is a pretty good help
file with the perl version that explains the program logic. Please make
sure you read the code to see if you want to limit postings based on
length also. Listproc doesn't so this well, it ignores the attachemnts. 



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