On 13 Oct 1997, Jari Aalto wrote:
| But the interchanges are close to overloaded in several key areas.
| (Witness the recent problems in mae-east, for example.) Gratuitously
| wasting bandwidth is really hard to justify.
I don't know who wastes band, but it is not the standard's like MIME fault,
which is good thing. An individual may waste band: one has a choice
of sending big file as mime x-gzip or as plain file 100K. Html files
are not essentially different from any other files.
[html and MUA]
Ok, lets put it this way. I have Netscape Communicator 4, IE4,
and *HAVE* all the cryptographic enhancements and capabilities
for displaying encrypted messages in every format known to man.
I also can display every possible type of MIME attachment. (I
have all the available plugins for EVERYTHING and a 26gig hard
disk to store all the stuff on.)
Now. I am connecting to the net through my Linux gateway, and
the gateway machine is in charge of downloading email with
fetchmail and storing it in the local mail feed in LINUX.
procmail is used to filter the messages for dupes/junk.
EVEN THOUGH I *CAN* display all of the HTML messages, and CAN use
the cryptographic signatures for verification, and my MUA is
cutting edge and beyond... I still want the CONTROL on the Linux
machine of FILTERING OUT messages (at my option) that contain
HTML attachments, cryptographic signatures, etc...
How do I do this? My MUA is capable, but the feature is not
required, nor wanted at the present time. To me what is
important is not having the stuff make it to the windows machine
in the first place. This means I must use a procmail filter.
| But how much better is it to recieve
| "<b>Yes</b>, I <i>want to</i> come to the party."
| instead of
| "Yes, I want to come to the party."
|
| Especially when you send the same message twice, once in each format.
| There isn't much traffic going through mailing lists that actually
| _needs_ html markup tags.
I agree that seeing HTML in places where it is not desired, like in
mailing lists, is not appropriate. Still, a good MUA would have
displayed the text as instructed and you wouldn't be annoyed by the
html markup.
That's fine and dandy. I can display HTML messages just fine.
That is not the problem. The problem is "How do I filter OUT
html mime attachements, cryptographic signatures, etc...". The
problem is not "How do I use them, or display them." Two
different problems entirely. The solution to the first one
requires a mail filter of some kind. Since this is a mail filter
(procmail) mailing list, the question is best asked here.
I know, I know, the MUA's are not up to MIME yet. I use Emacs and
that's basicly text based (in this regard XEmacs is much better), so
I do see the html. (it depends on my login, I also have automatic
html2text filter before I look at the message, so I actually don't see
any funny WORD6 or HTML or MS-NOTES markup..)
I don't want an html2text filter either (although it might be a
neat thing to have sometime too). I want an HTML > /dev/null
filter.
[PGP is desired, there is also X-pgp]
| Hmm. So it's good for everyone to use a different signature standard?
There is only one. The PGP. And X-pgp just dis/assembles PGP sig to/from
email headers, so that it's not one's way in the message.
PGP is fine.
| Especially the RSA format that netscape is using, that takes a 1 or 2 line
| message and turns it into a 1 or 2 _k_ message.
Huh! that sounds bad indeed.
Exactly why I want to do the filtering, and started this thread.
I've gotten a few useful responses from some of you kind souls,
but it still needs some work. I'm going to fiddle around this
weekend and see what I come up with, then post back.
Take care.
Mike A. Harris | Homepage: http://blackwidow.saultc.on.ca/~mharris
Computer Consultant | Am I online? - finger or ping capslock.dyn.ml.org
My dynamic address: http://blackwidow..saultc.on.ca/~mharris/ip-address.html
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