On Sun, 2 May 1999 12:40:01 +0200,
"Markus Wiedemeier" <pingu(_at_)tin(_dot_)it> wrote:
Whats the best way to create an autoforwarding rule, which
excludes messages with attachments.
Hmmm, tricky. Depends on what exactly you mean by "attachment".
Perhaps you should think more about the properties of the stuff you
want to avoid forwarding, rather than just lump it all under
"attachments". If it's always binary-encoded data, you can filter on
that instead (see below); if it's always Word documents, perhaps
always from a narrow set of Microsoft users, there are probably
patterns in those messages you can rely on, etc.
Random remarks:
* Attachments often come as MIME multiparts, but there is no simple
way to determine from the top-level MIME headers whether the
message will contain an "attached file" or e.g. a HTML-encrypted
duplicate of the text of the first, text-only part. (Perhaps you
want to block those as well, come to think of it.)
* Attachments are often uuencoded or base64-encoded. You could
exclude anything with, say, four consecutive lines over 50
characters long consisting of only printing characters. (Finding
good patterns for catching base64 and uuencode is left as an
exercise for the reader. If you're lazy, I believe you could find
some good examples in the archives of this mailing list; see
<http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/>)
* Possibly your best bet is to simply not forward anything longer than,
say, 20000 bytes.
In the end, it's probably easy to find a small set of simple criteria
for what you want, but it's somewhat likely that this will not be 100%
the same as (whatever criteria you use to define) "messages with
attachments". MIME is very versatile and can be used for a number of
very different things.
Hope this helps,
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