Re: RC: Re: RE: Limestone Challenge; Announcement

[David LeBlanc <dleblanc@mindspring.com>]

At 04:22 PM 5/19/00 -0700, Duncan Fletcher wrote:
>Go for it. In all the lists I am on, I have had the need for html only a
>couple of times - that on another list for drawings related to gait
>analysis. Of all the list serve mail I have received, only about twice has
>anything useful been html or attachments (for some folks horse pics may be
>useful, but I don't need to see a picture of somebody's cute new foal).

Stripping attachments isn't hard, but stripping HTML tags without causing
what a friend refers to as 'random acts of terrorism' can be really
difficult.  I think if there are legitimate attachments, people can find a
web site to put them on, and send a URL.  I really hate it when people
mass-mail idiotic, huge attachments, and this list generates too much
traffic as it is.

Plus, you're running the list out of a UNIX box (maybe Linux - can't tell
without a good bit of poking), which means implementing anti-virus measures
on the listserve itself will be difficult.  Additionally, a HTML
interpreter will play all sorts of games with you depending on character
sets, etc - you can't just do a:

s/<[^>]+>//;
(perl for get rid of anything that looks like an HTML tag), since %3a is
the same as '<'

Might be some way to kludge up something using a PC where you send the list
through a PC running a decent virus software, and THEN forward it to the
listserve.  I know there exist pretty decent anti-virus measures for
Exchange, but that's a non-trivial transition.


David LeBlanc
dleblanc@mindspring.com