[plug] HTML mail (partial flame and suggestions)

[Bret Busby]

On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, James Devenish wrote:

> Date: Sat, 02 Oct 2004 10:01:53 +0800
> From: James Devenish <devenish at guild.uwa.edu.au>
> Reply-To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> Newsgroups: plug.list
> Subject: Re: [plug] HTML mail (partial flame and suggestions)
> 
> In article <415D215D.9050603 at tigris.org>, Tim White wrote:
> > > An alternative is to filter all mail on the server to convert HTML
> > > to plain text,
> > Would doing this solve lots of problems though? Especially if an HTML 
> > exploit is sent from a subscribers address, there are going to be some 
> > people on the list using Outlook because they don't know any better. I 
> > know this should be addressed on the client end but after reading the 
> > stuff below as well I am thinking that filtering all emails through 
> > 'lynx -dump' or 'html2txt' or something similar may be benifitial on 
> > more than one way.
> 
> It is true that Mailman already includes a feature to do this (it can
> strip out the HTML part if a corresponding plain-text part is present,
> then convert any lone HTML parts to plain text). Of course, this can at
> times result in an unfaithful reproduction of what the sender sent to
> the list. But I'm not inclined to be the one to put my foot down and
> modify the list to use this feature given the current lack of feedback
> from others.
> 
> 

Rootsweb, which hosts about 50,000 mailing lists, simply strips off HTML 
components, and bounces messages that are HTML and do not have any text 
component.

Posters to the Rootsweb lists, have many different email applications, 
including Outlook Express, etc.

It seems to work okay for the Rootsweb lists, but I believe that 
Rootsweb uses Smartlist, and not Mailman.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of 
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams, 
  published by Pan Books, 1992 
....................................................