Re: disabling attachments

Daniel Liston wrote:
> No, not by default anyway.  First, you should make your no
> attachments policy known by sending a once/month message to
> the list from the owner/moderator.
>

My work has 150 users, and staff will send attachments to everyone on 
the lists.  Attachments can be anywhere from a few k to a couple of 
megabytes, and management doesn't want any email deleted, ever (we are 
an archival/educational/library government institution) so take a few 
megs per email x 150 users you suddenly have several hundred to 1G of 
email per mass message that I have to save, forever, to hard drive and 
tape.  Sending monthly notices won't help clueless users that don't care 
what the policy is.  i want them to send their attachments to the 
webmaster who will then put them on the website somewhere and send them 
a link they can email to everyone.

> Second, restrict posting to your list only by members of the
> list, or better yet, require moderator approval for postings.
> Violators of the policy can then be dealt with while preserving
> the pure ASCII content of your distributions.
I don't want to be a moderator for internal lists.  We are a government 
institution so there's nothing I can really do to punish bad users.
>
> Third, and probably the most important way to do this is to
> demime or stripmime all mail coming into your list.  Attachments
> are really just text appended to the body of your messages, with
> some boundaries and headers added to tell mail user agents how
> to deal with the message.  Removing anything that is not a pattern
> match for "Content-Type: text/plain" is a sure fire way to kill off
> any attachments the message may have had.  Removing contents of a
> message body after "Begin [octal number] [filename]" will get rid
> of the rest of any possible attachments.
>
> Using a moderator and restricted posting policies, the third choice
> is a manual process.  Without a moderator, you can automate some or
> all of this with add-ons.
>
> http://www.phred.org/~alex/stripmime.html
> I can't find a working link to demime right now.
>
> Dan Liston
stripmime looks cool, I'll play around with it tomorrow, thanks.