[Mailman-Developers] SCRUBBER Question

Robby Griffin rmg at terc.edu
Sat Sep 25 01:34:17 CEST 2004


On Friday, Sep 24, 2004, at 18:27 US/Eastern, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Robby Griffin wrote:
>>
>> Get real. It changes the extension not because .doc files are 
>> dangerous
>> but because the sender simply failed to use Mailman's idea of the
>> proper MIME type for a .doc file. You can of course get Mailman to
>> leave a .doc file as a .doc file by sending it in with a content-type
>> of application/msword. This just turns out to be unlikely in practice
>> because MUAs have limited knowledge of proper MIME types.
>
> So Mailman should dumb itself down to the level of these MUAs?
>
> Even Popcorn, my Windows client of choice, which is a fully self
> contained (except for a small initialization file) compressed
> executable 118KB in size, knows the proper MIME content-type for most
> common file types.

Well, whether it's common isn't really the issue. I meant that in 
general Alice's MUA does not have knowledge of what MIME types Bob's 
Mailman will accept (meaning, handle gracefully in archives) for a .foo 
file. I'd rather Mailman be liberal, not dumb, but it seems to amount 
to the same thing here.

Suppose that all MIME types used by all software are standardized and 
developed along a single timeline. If Mailman gets ahead of an MUA in 
terms of the set of MIME types it accepts, then senders won't be using 
the proper types yet and confusion will result if anyone sends 
attachments using the old types (in particular, their MUA's default 
type for unrecognized extensions). If Mailman lags behind an MUA then 
users may send using the new types that Mailman doesn't yet accept and 
confusion will result.

And of course if there are multiple timelines of development or 
nonstandard MIME types in some software, then confusion will result 
from the differing sets of MIME types known to each piece of software 
at any given time.

I'm not convinced this is a feature, it just seems so fragile.

	--Robby



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