[Mailman-Users] Fwd: HTML filter on the lists

[Mark Sapiro]

David Andrews wrote:

>I got the below message from a user, and am not quite sure what to do?  Any advice?
>
>>Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 00:30:29 -0600
>>From: "T. Joseph Carter" <tjcarter at bluecherry.net>
>>To: David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com>
>>Subject: HTML filter on the lists
>>
>>The filter you are using on text/html messages to the list really is very,
>>very broken.  First, it leaves parts of the HTML behind.  Second, it lies
>>about its output, claiming that all messages are now us-ascii (which
>>breaks character set conversion tools which need to know the original
>>character set in order to map to the correct one.)


Presumably the issue here is the conversion done by Content filtering
-> convert_html_to_plaintext. The simplest solution is just to set
this to 'No' and allow the HTML to go to the list unchanged, but you
may not want to allow 'non-defanged' HTML or any HTML at all on your
list.

Another solution is to remove text/html from the MIME types allowed on
your list and thus force your members to post plain text or at least
multipart/alternative. See <http://www.expita.com/nomime.html>.

If you want to continue to convert HTML to plaintext, there are a few
issues. You don't say what Mailman version this is, but from your
user's complaint, it seems it is pre-2.1.7. In versions prior to
2.1.7, HTML that was quoted-printable or base64 encoded was not
decoded prior to passing to HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND which caused
many problems. If this is the issue, you need to upgrade. Beyond that,
the default for HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND is '/usr/bin/lynx -dump
%(filename)s'. This may not be appropriate. Redefining this in
mm_cfg.py to the command suggested by your user may or may not be a
solution because of the way Mailman/Handlers/MimeDel.py resets the
converted payload

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