[INDOLOGY] Discarded email attachments (Re: Āryā verse)

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I don't understand this issue myself.  I didn't get Madhav's recording
myself (gmail user).  But the pattern of who does and who doesn't get the
attachments is not obvious.

The Mailman software uses the following rules for attachments:

Policies concerning the content of list traffic.

Content filtering works like this: when a message is received by the list
and you have enabled content filtering, the individual attachments are
first compared to the * filter types.* If the attachment type matches an
entry in the filter types, it is discarded.

Then, if there are *pass types* defined, any attachment type that does *not*
match a pass type is also discarded. If there are no pass types defined,
this check is skipped.

After this initial filtering, any multipart attachments that are empty are
removed. If the outer message is left empty after this filtering, then the
whole message is discarded.

Then, each multipart/alternative section will be replaced by just the first
alternative that is non-empty after filtering if *collapse_alternatives* is
enabled.

Finally, any text/html parts that are left in the message may be converted
to text/plain if *convert_html_to_plaintext* is enabled and the site is
configured to allow these conversions.


   - filter types: none, so nothing should ever be discarded by this
   criterion.
   - pass types are as follow, and should cover most types of file that
   people want to attach:
   multipart
   text/plain
   text/html
   text/xml
   application/pgp-signature
   message/rfc822
   image/jpeg
   image/pjpeg
   application/pdf
   image/gif
   image/tiff
   application/msword
   application/x-dvi
   application/postscript
   application/x-tex
   application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text
   application/x-vnd.oasis.opendocument.text
   - Files with the following extensions are removed:
   exe
   bat
   cmd
   com
   pif
   scr
   vbs
   cpl
   - collapse_alternatives is set to "no"
   - *convert_html_to_plaintext* is set to "no"

Now, mp3 files are not included in the pass types.  That would, I think,
explain why Mailman didn't forward Madhav's voice recording.  And yet some
people received it.  That's baffling.

I've now added audio/mpeg to the "pass types", so mp3s should get through
in future.  Also audio/ogg.  I haven't added /wav files because they are
typically unreasonably huge.


Dominik Wujastyk, for the INDOLOGY committee.


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