Re: customizing an archive (future feature)

On September 23, 2004 at 18:36, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:

> Also, it may be possible to enable some configuration control using
> incoming messages themselves. For example, the list admin could put in
> special RFC822 headers on messages that activate a configuration change.
> Or add special subscribers to the list.

This is security problem.  I considered something similiar
to this awhile back for a potential project I was considering.
I think the only way to do this securely is for the messages to be
cryptographically signed, like with PGP and/or S/MIME.  A list admin
could register their public key with the site for verification of
administration-based messages.

This mainly leaves the case of verifying the initial identity of
the list admin.  For example, someone could initially claim they
are the administrator for a list and give you they key to use for
verification.  A way to deal with this is that any list that is
archived must support an admin address for the list, for example
listname-owner-4sz/nAsXmlo+6oi84+IkFeG/[email protected]  The domain portion should be
equal to the domain used for the list.

When a list admin makes the initial request to register themselves, a
confirmation email is sent to the list admin address.  The confirmation
mail contains instructions to finalize the registration process.

All of this can be automated, but some work would be required to
set it all up.

--ewh

P.S. Right now, I am not sure if allowing external references
to stylesheets opens up mail-archive.com to XSS attacks.  If a
registration process is established, you may require that any
stylesheet customizations be submitted to mail-archive and that such
stylesheets must conform to a specific template.