Kevin Colagio wrote:
>
> 'Morning!
>
> We have a few mailing lists that have requested to receive mail that is
> plain text only, stripping out all attachments, "fancy stuff" (bullets,
> etc..), and making mail what (us old-timers ;) ) think e-mail should be.
>
> I haven't found anything in Exim to do this, but I've come up with some
> ideas and I need a knowledgeable body to bounce them to...so here goes...
>
> 1) Setup a lookup file that has a list of "plain text only" requesters.
> 2) Setup a router that checks the incoming mail against that list
> 2a) If they are on the list, send the message to a transport that will
> de-mime it.
> 2b) If they are not on the list, continue to next router.
> 3) Deliver the message to the mailing list as normal, demimed if they
> were on the list.
>
> Now, a few options that fall out of this...
> 1) If the mail goes to recipient-mime, it goes through without being
> demimed.
> 2) recipient-demime (regardless of being on the list) are always demimed.
>
> So if this theory is right....? ...then what I could use is help
> setting it up. I do plan on using demime (
> http://scifi.squawk.com/demime.html ) to do the processing.
>
> <puts on his dunce cap>
> My big "I'm not sure how it works..." is this: What's the flow of a
> message through the routers to the transport and back to the routers?
> Does it start at the top again or continue where it "broke out"? If it
> varies, a breakdown of when/where it changes would help a lot. The
> other thing I'm not sure of is if I send something to a pipe, how does
> it get back into the mailing system after modification?
> </removes dunce cap>
>
> Thanks in advance. Summarization will be provided if needed so others
> understand as well.
>
AFAIK, Exim, that most-flexible-of-MTA's, *can* do this ... whether 'as
above' I will leave to others.
But should it? IME, the far better place to do it is in the MLM, not in
the MTA.
All the 'major' MLM either have the facility inbuilt, or have well-known
hooks to external mime-handling tools that can do it.
Not 'new' need by any means. Think of the poor retiree on expensive
dial-up getting the overhead of html+syle sheets... :-(
Aside from reducing load and complexity within Exim, configuring within
the MLM will generally also provide more flexibility as to whether is is
applied to ALL members of ALL lists, only to selected lists, sub-lists,
and/or only to selected members, appplied/not applied to 'digests',
copied to a BB or wiki, etc.
Not to mention, if you are not the list-admin, you can then leave the
'dynamic' hassle of 'who-wants-what-format-this-week' to whomever wears
that hat. 'Specially for MLM's that (can) run in user-space and do not
even need 'shell' access to manage (Ecartis , to name one such).
JM2CW, YMMV
Bill Hacker
