[hypermail] Avoiding archiving viral content

From: Scott Rose <srose_at_direct.ca_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 15:56:23 -0700
Message-ID: <3B33CD17.AECB12DC_at_direct.ca>

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. Received on Sat 23 Jun 2001 01:01:45 AM GMT