[Mimedefang] How to trap this spam

[Jonas Eckerman]

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 09:30:56 -0500, WBrown at e1b.org wrote:

>  Have many of you been successful in convincing management to allow
>  stippping redundent HTML parts?

Due to quite a few newsletters, I have been (and will continue to be if I decide to keep trying) very unsucceful in this. There's a bunch of newsletters where the text/plain part doesn't contain a text version of the mail, instead it just contains a short text stating that the recipient cant't read HTML mails or something like that.

Too me that's a violation of the purpose of multipart/alternative, and I really do think such mails should not contain a text/plain at all. Still, people want to read the newsletters, so...

There's also newsletters that has a text/plain, but where the text/plain part is badly formatted and no fun to read.

Considering that we are a non-commersial organization for deafblind people, meaning quite a few users and employees are using brailee displays and/or speech syntheseizers, I really would like to get rid of as much HTML mails as possible. Text is a lot easier if you can't see. And we really should be trying to persuade the senders of newsletters to send usuable text parts, but again considering that we are a non-commersial organization, we constantly face a lack of both time and money...

I am stripping all redundant HTML parts going do one of our domains though, but that's a lot easier to justify. That domain is a gateway to a FNT network were the systems are text-only (and for wich the gateway convert HTML to text anyways) and to a (not yet in production) nntp-based online forum (constisting of a webbased news client, a public newsserver and a mailinglist<->news gateway). I am considering implementing some kind of HTML -> text conversion as well for pure HTML mails (with no text/plain that is) going into that domain.

Regards
/Jonas
-- 
Jonas Eckerman, jonas_lists at frukt.org
http://www.fsdb.org/