[Mailman-Users] Digest message header filtering

[Jim Littlefield]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 04:04:14PM +0000, Simon White wrote:
> 30-Jan-03 at 10:56, Jim Littlefield (little at abaqus.com) wrote :
> > A number of the subscribers to my lists have complained about the
> > "unimportant" headers (Message-ID, In-Reply-To, etc.) included with
> > each post when receiving a plain digest. I am talking about headers
> > within the digest. Has anyone figured out a good way to strip these
> > out?
> 
> If you have Postfix as an MTA, then you can do body_checks on the email
> *body* only to silently ignore any lines with extraneous headers by
> using a regexp to ignore them. However, this is best done on a server
> which is not also an all-purpose MTA in case people forward full headers
> to others for analysis.
> 
> Other solutions from your MTA of choice are possible, in Mailman itself
> you'd have to hack Digester.py. At first glance, it looks like it pretty
> much forwards plaintext mbox style, to Handlers/ToDigest.py. This
> handles MIME conversion where necessary.

I guess my question wasn't very clear...I was referring to headers
*within* the body of the digest; not the digest's headers. So this isn't
an MTA issue, just a message content one.

> Interesting part of ToDigest.py
> 
> # rfc1153 says we should keep only these headers, and present them in
> # this
> # exact order.
> KEEP = ['Date', 'From', 'To', 'Cc', 'Subject', 'Message-ID', 'Keywords',
>         # I believe we should also keep these headers though.
>         'In-Reply-To', 'References', 'Content-Type', 'MIME-Version',
>         'Content-Transfer-Encoding', 'Precedence', 'Reply-To',
>         # Mailman 2.0 adds these headers, but they don't need to be kept
>         # from
>         # the original message: Message
>         ]

Hmmm, I'll have to take a look at that file. Thanks for pointing it out.

> Hacking that might allow you to get rid of those headers quite simply,
> breaking RFC1153 in the process, perhaps.
> 
> (I think I should stop promoting Postfix on the Mailman list now...)

Why? Postfix is a great MTA :)

-- 
Jim Littlefield             "All those who believe in psychokinesis
                             raise my hand." - Steven Wright