[Mailman-Users] attachments being stored for plain-text digests

[Mark Sapiro]

Elizabeth Lear wrote:
>
>A list on my site is not using content filtering, and has set digests
>to plain mode.  I've double-checked that all digest subscribers are
>also set to plain mode.  

This is irrelevant to the following. Digest plain or mime only governs
whether the individual messages in the digest are all concatenated
into one plain text digest or are each in their own separate MIME
message/rfc822 part. It doesn't affect whether or not or which
attachments are scrubbed from messages which process is long since
done before the two different digest formats are created.

>The list owner reports the following problem:
>"Some of the digest posts are going into attachments, and then are
>replaced with the following
>  > An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
>  > URL:
>http://net.indra.com/pipermail/hostpost/attachments/20050714/cbc662b9/attach
>ment.html
>  >
>  When you click on the link, it doesn't go an active web page."

It's working just as it should. See below.
>I don't expect that the link would work, since we don't have archives
>enabled.

This only matters in terms of your web server - see below.

>Is the problem that the list owner should be either
>stripping attachments with content filtering or enabling MIME digests
>in order to handle the attachments?

No. The scrubber scrubs and saves attachments into the archive
hierarchy whether or not archiving is enabled for the list and
regardless of what the ultimate digest format will be. It creates a
URL to the saved attachment either like

http://net.indra.com/pipermail/hostpost/attachments/20050714/cbc662b9/attachment.html

if the list's archive_private attribute is 'public' or like

http://net.indra.com/mailman/private/hostpost/attachments/20050714/cbc662b9/attachment.html

if the list's archive_private attribute is 'private'.

In your case, I suspect that the list's archive_private attribute is
set to 'public', but since you 'don't have archives enabled' you don't
have something like

Alias   /pipermail/     /var/mailman/archives/public/

in your web server configuration to make the first URL work.

Stripping attachments with content filtering won't prevent scrubbing
either as even text/plain attachments can be scrubbed depending on
charset. See for example
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-July/045887.html

You have two choices:
1) Enable public archive access in your web server, or
2) change the list's archive_private attribute to 'private' which will
create the second type of URL in the future which will require
subscribers to log in with their e-mail address and password to see
the attachment.

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