Hello,
I would like to remove all attachments of the mails going to a specific mailing list. Browsing the doc and the faq, I have seen that we can block specific attachment, according to their MIME type, but I want to remove all of them. Can I do this with mailman ?
Thank you,
Guillaume Morin
Guillaume Morin wrote:
I would like to remove all attachments of the mails going to a specific mailing list. Browsing the doc and the faq, I have seen that we can block specific attachment, according to their MIME type, but I want to remove all of them. Can I do this with mailman ?
This is a little tricky, but you can probably do what you want.
There are various options depending on exactly the results you want, but for example, placing the following in pass_mime_types (with filter_content Yes)
text/plain multipart/alternative
will remove everything except plain text messages and plain text parts from multipart/alternative messages. This probably isn't what you want because it also removes everything from a multipart/mixed message including the plain text part if any.
If you add
multipart/mixed
to the above, you will allow the plain text parts, but this also allows plain text attachments.
I use
multipart/mixed multipart/alternative message/rfc822 text/plain
on most lists and this allows pretty much all plain text through and nothing else (It does block e.g. multipart/related, but this rarely if ever contains plain text).
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
At 8:16 AM -0800 2005-01-05, Mark Sapiro wrote:
multipart/mixed multipart/alternative message/rfc822 text/plain
That's good, but it does break some forms of PGP signed messages. On the lists I manage, we almost always use something like the following:
multipart/mixed multipart/alternative text/plain application/pgp-signature multipart/signed
To this list, we should probably add message/rfc822, for the sake of completeness.
-- Brad Knowles, brad@stop.mail-abuse.org
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755SAGE member since 1995. See http://www.sage.org/ for more info.
It really would be so much better if there were a simple setting to reject ALL messages with attachments, as some other mailing list software provides. It can't be so difficult...
On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:29:38 +0100, Guillaume Morin gmorin@sysif.net wrote:
Hello,
I would like to remove all attachments of the mails going to a specific mailing list. Browsing the doc and the faq, I have seen that we can block specific attachment, according to their MIME type, but I want to remove all of them. Can I do this with mailman ?
Thank you,
Guillaume Morin
Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/
At 1:43 PM -0800 2005-02-22, Allen Watson wrote:
It really would be so much better if there were a simple setting to reject ALL messages with attachments, as some other mailing list software provides. It can't be so difficult...
Actually, yes it is. MIME bodypart types come in pairs, and there are an unlimited number of potential combinations of these pairs. Moreover, there are also a variety of other attachment/encoding techniques (uuencode, binhex, etc...) which do not depend on MIME at all, and in fact would look to the program just like normal ASCII text. Indeed, the entire purpose of many of these alternative encoding techniques was to be able to survive being transmitted via 7-bit ASCII-only transmission networks, such as can be provided by e-mail.
And don't get me started on steganography.
Given that there are an unlimited number of possible encoding techniques, it is physically impossible to block them all.
This is why Mailman provides the tools that it does, and it allows you to choose to either filter out the stuff you know to be bad (allowing through everything else), or to allow through only the stuff you know to be good (filtering everything else).
This problem is much more complex than you give it credit for. Do Internet e-mail systems administration for a decade or two, and you'll find that there are all sorts of bizarre things out there that you never thought could possibly exist.
Mailman can only deal with those things that it knows about, and we've given you powerful tools that will help you solve most of the problems, if you use them correctly.
-- Brad Knowles, brad@stop.mail-abuse.org
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755SAGE member since 1995. See http://www.sage.org/ for more info.
Allen Watson wrote:
It really would be so much better if there were a simple setting to reject ALL messages with attachments, as some other mailing list software provides. It can't be so difficult...
On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:29:38 +0100, Guillaume Morin gmorin@sysif.net wrote:
Hello,
I would like to remove all attachments of the mails going to a specific mailing list. <snip>
Did you read the follow-ups to that thread at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-January/041697.html and http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-January/041706.html
If you really want to "reject ALL messages with attachments" just put
multipart/alternative text/plain
in pass_mime_types as mentioned in the first message referenced above. Or you could put just
text/plain
in pass_mime_types and reject everything except single part plain text messages.
It isn't difficult until you start considering the non-obvious cases of signed messages, plain text messages forwarded as attachments, plain text attachments, etc. and what you want to do in those cases.
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (4)
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Allen Watson -
Brad Knowles -
Guillaume Morin -
Mark Sapiro