From: Scott Rose (srose@direct.ca)
Date: Fri Jun 22 2001 - 17:56:23 CDT
I'd like to avoid archiving viruses as attachments. We run several
hundred hypermail lists, and everytime there is another outbreak of
virus, there is the need to go into the archives and crudely hack out
the offending attachments. Since it's so painful to remove entire
messages, my practice has been to just rm the attachments, but I still
get complaints from users who don't realize that cleanup has been
performed. Best would be to prevent archiving this stuff in the place of
firstness.
I had high hopes for the ignore_types option. But ignore_types is based
upon the MIME type of the attachment, which is set by the sending
client. Not good enough. My Netscape mailer, for example, sends .vbs
attachments as video/mpeg (for reasons unknown and apparently
unknowable), and I'm not even *trying* to circumvent the mechanism.
My next idea is to add my own code to reject attachments based upon
filename extension. That would work, but one is reluctant to create yet
another local fork of hypermail, and I dream that others have found a
way to work this issue using facilities already present in hypermail.
OASDN, configuring hypermail to ignore MIME types isn't as much fun as
I thought it would be. I am loathe to put the list of offending types
into a .hmrc file because I want to let users control details of their
archives themselves. What would be neato would be if there could be a
hierarchy of config files, perhaps implemented via an include command.
Instead, I hacked setup.c to set a value. Another little fork in the
road.