[Mailman-Users] Handling Attachments and More

[Mark Sapiro]

David Andrews wrote:

>I have a Sun Cobalt RAQ550 with Mailman 2.1.8 installed, and running 
>about 120 lists.  We were having problems with the setup handling 
>multi-part messages that contained text and html -- some mail 
>programs reproduced stuff twice etc.  Also we need to pass attachments.
>
>On the advice of someone I made some changes, content filtering 
>settings below, and while the multi-part thing is a little better, it 
>only passes text attachments.  Need to pass .doc etc.
>
>I am obviously not an expert in this stuff, or I wouldn't be 
>bothering all of you.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.


Your copy/paste of the web page is missing some information, namely,
which radio buttons are selected.


>Should Mailman filter the content of list traffic according to the 
>settings below? 
[...]
>No Yes

I assume this is Yes


>Remove message attachments that have a matching content type. 
[...]
>text/html


Generally, you don't want entries in both filter_mime_types and
pass_mime_types, since if you have anything in pass_mime_types,
everything else will be filtered whether it's here or not.


>Remove message attachments that don't have a matching content type. 
[...]
>multipart/alternative message/rfc822 text/plain


So you are accepting only elemental text/plain messages and text/plain
parts from multipart/alternative parts. This drops everything that
isn't text/plain and also drops text/plain subparts from other
multipart types.

For example, if you have a message with structure

multipart/mixed
    multipart/alternative
        text/plain
        text/html
    application/msword

which is a common structure for a message with an attached ms-word
file, you delete everything because you don't accept multipart/mixed.


What you probably want here is something like

multipart
message/rfc822
text/plain
application/msword
application/pdf
(etc.)


>Remove message attachments that have a matching filename extension. 
[...]
>exe bat cmd com pif scr vbs cpl

OK


[...]
>Should Mailman collapse multipart/alternative to its first part 
>content? 
[...]
>No Yes


This is probably irrelevant in most cases if you don't accept
text/html, but unless you want to actuall accept and pass say both
text/plain and text/html alternatives, set this to Yes.


>Should Mailman convert text/html parts to plain text? This conversion 
>happens after MIME attachments have been stripped. 
[...]
>No Yes


This should be Yes, only if you accept text/html, and you set
collapse_alternatives to Yes, and you want remaining html parts
converted to plain text.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan