On 6 Jun 01 at 22:55, Les Niles is alleged to have scribbled:
On Wed, 6 Jun 2001 18:29:23 -0400 barry@digicool.com (Barry A. Warsaw) wrote:
[I've moved this discussion over to mailman-developers. -BAW]
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So what I'm envisioning is an extensible architecture, a la the message pipelines, where each filter is implemented in a separate Python module, conforming to a particular, yet-to-be-defined API. Mailman will provide a bunch of canned defaults, like "strip-mime-leaving-only-text/plain" or "match-vbs-attachments". There will probably be some kind of mix-in model for describing the action to take when a filter module matches. ...
While a general and powerful mime handler would be nice, and is probably the right thing to do in terms of the long-term development, I think that one can get most of the benefit from a much simpler solution. A few months ago I hacked together a mime handler with the goal of making the stuff that comes from Outhouse, AOL, etc. look like plain-text mail, as well as enforcing prohibitions on postings images and other binaries. The handler is based on the mimetools library; it discards sections with certain mime types specified by per-list regexps, and removes multipart/* wrappers that become redundant after the stripping. Nothing fancy, but it has cleaned up 95% of the crap on our lists -- mostly text/html but also the occassional image/* or application/*. (Ripping out text/html works because so far it's always accompanied by corresponding text/plain, except for contributions from spammers, the deletion of which is a feature.)
this is exactly what I'm looking for (as a user)! (I started a thread on it yesterday) as to the UI, I see a simple set of options like ( ) keep text/html ( ) keep image/* ( ) keep application/* . .
as a starting point at least. the admin can select one or more of them. with all of them off, only text/plain is kept. if a message has no plain text portion, it is held for the moderator.
maybe some thought can also be given to filtering out hoax virus warnings? I've put in a regexp on 'virus' in the subject which will stop postings for moderator approval, but as I said yesterday, the regexp matching is a bit limited in what it sends back to the user, being singularly uninformative. some configurability would be nice there.... as in, when regexp x is matched, send message x, when Y is matched, send message Y etc.... instead of the blanket 'suspicious header' thing (-:
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pretty well.
-les les@2pi.org
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