removing arbitrary headers [Mailman-Developers] [Mailman-Users]

[James Ralston]

On 2004-04-04 at 11:01:22-07 Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui at plaidworks.com> wrote:
> I definitely see it as useful to be able to strip out headers that
> cause systems to auto-reply with a return receipt.

IMHO, this statement can be shortened to "I definitely think it would
be useful to strip out arbitrary headers."

Case in point: we use SpamAssassin to analyze and tag incoming email
(meaning, email received from external sites).  All scanned messages
receive an "X-Spam-Status" header; messages which scored as probable
spam also receive an "X-Spam-Level" header.  This permits mailing list
owners to add this bounce_matching_headers rule:

    x-spam-level: \.

But we'd like to have these headers removed when the message is
distributed to the members of the list.

While I can strip those headers at the MTA level (the combination of
sendmail + MIMEDefang is a wonderful thing), it can be tricky to do it
correctly.  I think it would be cleaner to strip them from within
Mailman.

If, at some point in the future, I feel that my Python skills are up
to the task, I'll probably take a crack at implementing something like
this.  But until then (or until someone else beats me to it), I think
it's definitely a good idea.

-- 
James Ralston, Information Technology
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA