[Mailman-Users] Found new Subscriber Moderate box unchecked andMIME attachments now appearing

[Mark Sapiro]

HPA wrote:
>
>I've searched the Mailman Users FAQ and archives and cannot find an answer
>to my issue below.
>
>Our moderated Mailman list (running on Mailman 2.1.4) had been chugging
>along just fine for the past five months. Then abruptly this week we found
>several new subscribers posting to the list unmoderated! When I investigated
>Mailman admin settings I found the new subscriber moderate box unchecked!
>How could this setting be changed without human interaction? Anyway I
>re-checked it and re-set all accounts to moderated.

Mailman won't change it. Possibly someone was making some other list
admin changes and changed it by accident. Someone I once worked with
called it "ghosts". There is no log or audit trail of these changes,
so you may never know.

>At the same time this occurred, and thus may be related, some posts to the
>list began showing up with attachments. Before this time we had been
>successfully filtering attachments, without a single attachment making it
>through to the list.

You may have changed list header and/or footer or you may have a new
poster who's posting in a different format. See below.

>Example of a recent post which included attachments is included below (with
>relevant headers). Note the two attachments in the post below appear as a
>graphical rule (horizontal line), one separating the header from the body
>and the other between the body and the footer (see below). (At least this is
>how they appear in Outlook Express, which by necessity I use to view
>messages posted to the list).


These are not really attachments. They appear to be the msg_header and
msg_footer which have been added as separate MIME parts because their
character set and encoding did not match that of the message.

Outlook Express shows them in this way. Some other MUAs will do the
same and some will display the whole message in one piece.

See http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.039.htp


>We have the list setup to convert all HTML to text. Below is the lists
>current 'Content Filtering' settings.
>
>Any thoughts on why we are suddenly observing the appearance of attachments
>and any recommendations to filter them out? We're just happy with straight
>text.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Woody
>
>--
>Current 'Content Filtering' settings:
>
>Should Mailman filter the content of list traffic according to the settings
>below?
>Yes
>
>Remove message attachments that have a matching content type.
>None listed.
>
>Remove message attachments that don't have a matching content type.
>multipart/mixed
>multipart/alternative
>text/plain
>
>Should Mailman convert text/html parts to plain text?
>yes.
>
>Action to take when a message matches the content filtering rules.
>Discard


The above is not the issue. It is OK


>---------------
>Below is example of list message including HTML (with relevant header info).
>---------------
>
>
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
> boundary="----=_NextPart_000_00A9_01C518E5.D82AFB00"
>X-Mailman-Approved-At: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:42:03 -0800
>X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.4

Content filtering was applied.

>Cc:
>
>X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.4
>Precedence: list
>
>
>This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
>
>------=_NextPart_000_00A9_01C518E5.D82AFB00
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Content-Disposition: inline
>
>News list:
>

is this a msg_header? If not, it was a separate part in the original.
If yes, see remarks under footer.


>------=_NextPart_000_00A9_01C518E5.D82AFB00
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>
>
>BODY of message...
>
>
>
>------=_NextPart_000_00A9_01C518E5.D82AFB00
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Content-Disposition: inline
>
>Footer...
>

The footer is added as a separate part because its 7bit incoding and
us-ascii character set aren't the same as the quoted-printable
encoding and iso-8859-1 character set of the body.


--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan