Re: How many people filter/block MIME on their lists?

[Aumont - Comite Reseaux des Universites]

> I recently was talking to somebody working on their own mail client, and 
> they were planning on not including plain text support.  How many lists 
> would filter their messages out?

Of course it is stupid to provide mail without text/plain. Text/plain is very
usefull for many email application, but it is a nice provocation
because MLM is often a argument to break Mime usage.

Even if there is a lot of bag usage of Mime, Mime is part of internet*
standard, a MLM should be able to carry any kind of mime messages and MLM
should be able to use itself Mime features.

Sympa MLM is able to reject or to forward multipart or multipart/alternative
messages to the list editor. This can be configured foreach list (or for all
the list server). Sympa is also able to parse multipart messages for list
server commands and to send welcome or helpfile messages using text/html
(or any other complex mime stucture).

In addition , Sympa can perform multipart/signed SMIME messages in order to
authenticate the message sender before ditribute it or perform a privileged
command.

We plans to introduce a lot of new features based on MIME. 

- Multipart/crypted : decrypte SMIME messages  and send the message to each
subscriber crypted with its public key.

- Multipart/mixed : 
    - reject (or send to editor) some kind of attachement like
      application/word
    - extract some kind of attachement from the message distributed but
      leave them in the web archive of the mailling list
    - ...

- Multipart/alternative : perform subscriber format preference in order to
  send to each subscriber its prefered format when distributing a
  Multipart/alternative message (so some users will received text/plain
  where some others will receive the text/html alternative).

I think that MLM should be a good reason to use more and more Mime
features.

Serge
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Serge Aumont      CRU (french academic network technical team)
                  campus Beaulieu             
                  35042 Rennes Cedex France