viruses, HTML mail, etc

[David LeBlanc <dleblanc@mindspring.com>]

At 12:58 PM 5/22/00 -0400, Ben Turner wrote:

>On Sat, 20 May 2000 22:54:21 -0700, David LeBlanc wrote:
>>Stripping attachments isn't hard, but stripping HTML tags without causing
>>what a friend refers to as 'random acts of terrorism' can be really
>>difficult.  

>     Much of the HTML on the list is just duplicating the text body.
>The text bodies are usually appropriately identified with MIME compliant
>headers including "Content-Type: text/plain;" while the offending HTML
>section headers usually include "Content-Type: text/html;"  Therefore,
>much could be accomplished at the MIME section level without relying on 
>detecting/stripping HTML within the text.  MIME aware PERL modules
>and mail utilities exist that might streamline this process. 
>
>     I support the notion of dumping all attachments _and_ HTML.

That might work to strip out a well-behaved HTML mail, but it won't do a
thorough job of getting rid of all script based viruses. These, almost by
definition, aren't going to be following the rules.  You could try it for a
while on your inbox and see if it causes any problems.  Set up an account
local to the listserv, subscribe it to the list, and then set up a .forward
that processes it and sends it along to an account read from a PC. I
wouldn't miss the HTML mail personally - formatting is nice, but not
essential.  I would expect some malfunctions while the process is fine-tuned.

I've been surprised - I haven't seen very many posts that attempted to send
the virus back, so maybe most people have taken counter-measures.


David LeBlanc
dleblanc@mindspring.com