[Mimedefang] The MIMEDefang HOWTO

[David F. Skoll]

Hi, Mickey.

It's an excellent HOWTO.  I have a few comments.

Section 4:  Qpopper is pretty specific to your setup.  I use IMAP on
my mail server.  You might want to at least point out this link:

http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/

That's the Cyrus IMAP server, and it's an industrial-strength solution
for thousands of mailboxes.  You don't need to give detailed HOWTO
instructions, but at least make newbies aware that Qpopper is just one
choice.

Section 5.5.2: The latest mime-tools-patch.txt no longer breaks any of
the regression tests.  The patched MIME-tools should pass all of its tests.

Section 9.1: There's a new "filter_multipart" function (which I don't
think is in 2.8, but will be in 2.9.)  It's a bit hard to explain, but
you can have nested mail messages where the headers for the "container"
disagree with the headers for the "contained".  For example:


--MIME-Boundary-1
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="whats-goin-on.exe";

Subject: Huh?
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Description: confused.bat; name="confused.bat";

blah blah

--MIME-Boundary-1--

The "message/rfc822" type is a "container" type.  In this example,
the filter functions would be called as follows:

filter_multipart()  where filename is "whats-goin-on.exe"

        followed by

filter()            where filename is "confused.bat"

MIME is horrible. :-(  Inside filter_multipart(), you can do anything you
would normally do with filter(), except there is no "body".  The
multipart-entity just contains sub-parts.

General comments:  Some bits of text look like they've come from the
MIMEDefang man pages.  I'd appreciate this wording in Section 1.4:

"Thanks to David Skoll, Roaring Penguin Software, for writing and
maintaining MIMEDefang and providing some of the text of this
document."

Looks great!

Regards,

David.