4 Feb
2000
4 Feb
'00
11:29 a.m.
On Feb 4, 17:01, Jay West wrote:
Now that the major issue appears to be resolved,
I'm taking requests on
any other list behaviour that people don't like. I don't promise to
implement all of them, but I'll gladly take a look at it.
My request-for-enhancement is:
"do something" about HTML, or better still, "do something" about
any "multipart/alternative" posting (which would include M$
richtext, with those application/ms-tnef attachments).
Options I can think of:
a) silently discard any such postings (probably not a good idea)
b) bounce them back to the author, with an explanation of why bounced
c) remove the non-text part
d) combination of (b) and (c)
e) accept, but warn the author (who may not realise (s)he's sent HTML)
All of these would involve scanning the content to a greater or lesser
extent. I've no idea how doable that would be with majordomo, whether the
extra processing is acceptable to the server, or whether Jay has the time
to do that.
Just for information, some of these policies are implemented on our
helpdesk at work, which automatically tracks, redirects, and archives user
support enquiries. We implement (e) on the first "offence", and (b)
thereafter, but since every incoming email is read by a human, we do it by
paw and memory, and occasionally discretion (ie we tend to discard fewer
mails from professors than students :-)). We also have a policy of
discarding attachments (or indeed any message) by simple automated
truncation at the 10-kilobyte mark (mainly to prevent filling mailboxes and
archives with "why doesn't this 4Mb PostScript/JPEG/Word document print?").
I think the record idiocy was a 63MB Word document ("I can't send this
document to my friend. Why?")
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York