[Mailman-Users] email footers

[Mark Sapiro]

Jim Popovitch wrote:
>
>what would it take to have Mailman strip lines 
>that begin with special characters.  For instance, if I change my 
>footers on the "top posters" lists to something like this:
>
>     ++ -----------------------------
>     ++ Top Posters mailing list at lusers.tld
>     ++ http://lusers.tld/mailman/listinfo/top-posters
>     ++ FAQ: (not needed since they won't read it)
>     ++ Search http://.......
>
>could Mailman be modified/configure to remove all "footer" messages that 
>begin with "++ "?   I know of the possibilities for things to go bad 
>when editing the body, but it just seems like a good oppty to auto clean 
>up messages that others don't.


There is no configuration option to do this. If you want to do it in
code, you could implement a custom handler to do it (see
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.067.htp>).

It may not be straightforward depending on what content filtering you
already do. I would add the handler after the existing content
filtering (MimeDel) handler so you don't have to deal with parts that
are going to be removed anyway.

I used to manage some Topica.com lists and they did it by enclosing the
footer between funny lines like

     ---^---------------------------------------------
     Top Posters mailing list at lusers.tld
     http://lusers.tld/mailman/listinfo/top-posters
     FAQ: (not needed since they won't read it)
     Search http://.......
     ---^---------------------------------------------

They figured that '---^---------------------------------------------'
wouldn't ever appear in a post other than in their footer and they
could recognize the line even if it were preceded by various quoting
characters. So they just looked for that line and deleted it and
everything up to and including the next one.

This worked OK for plain text except it got their footer, but not those
added by Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. so it was only partly effective.

HTML was another story. It worked OK some of the time, but what they
did was when they found the funny pattern, they deleted the entire
line that contained it. This didn't work too well with MUAs that
formatted HTML parts without any line breaks in the raw HTML source
since it deleted the entire contents of the HTML part resulting in a
'blank' message. MSN Explorer 7.02 was the MUA that was responsible
for this at that time, but there may be others.

The moral is if you're going to programatically remove parts of the
message body, be careful.

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