[Mailman-Developers] filtering extensions?

[David A. Forsyth]

Hiya all

I've just joined in order to make a suggestion for futer development 
of mailman.

Let me fill you in a bit...
I'm a programmer working in Delphi, and a network admin (Novell), AND 
I have a hobby....   

In the interests of the hobby (railways) I run a list using mailman 
on a machine administered by someone else (a Unix guru of note).

My immediate problem is that multipart MIME encoded messages on the 
list I run pose a huge virus infection threat to all the members 
(apart form being just downright annoying to those who use mailers 
that don't interpret them). I'm a member of some Yahoo groups and I 
see that their list software trims off 'non text portions' of the 
messages.  In other words, it only sends on the plain text and dumps 
all the rich text, text/html, ms-tnef etc bits of junk that arrive in 
multipart MIME format.

So, I'm wondering if such filtering can be done by mailman so that 
list members need not be troubled to reset the default encoding 
schemes on their various flavours of PC, and yet be safe from 
receiving virus's via the list.

(note my list does not accept images either, so filtering out ALL 
attachments would not bother *me* in this application, yetis a 
consideration for other lists)

For now, I've done a fiddle in the list settings by putting a check 
for multipart MIME in the headers so I get to veto them as moderator.
Unfortunatly, the message sent back to offenders is a bit misleading 
in that it says 'message contained a suspicous header' no matter what 
rule triggered it.   A possible extension to mailman is to allow 
pattern specific messages and actions at this point.

thanks
--
   Living in South Africa
      Flying power Kites
         Chasing 3'6" gauge trains
http://terrapin.ru.ac.za/satrain