[arch-general] HTML email will be rejected

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:04:09 -0600
> Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>> I am writing to inform you that I have changed all the Arch lists to
>> reject HTML formatted email. Please send messages in plain text only.
>>
>> Note: This is true of all lists, but I am only sending this message to
>> the higher trafficked lists.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Aaron
>
> Any specific reason? afaik html emails are 100% backwards compatible, eg
> those who don't want them can see the txt variant, no?

That is only if you client also sends a text variant in a multipart
mime encoding. I believe mailman may still accept those and expand the
text portion.

To quote the mailman docs:
----------
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.
----------
Allowed mimetypes:
multipart/mixed
multipart/alternative
message/rfc822
text/plain

But to answer the "reason" part - we get periodic spam on these lists
and the only ones that seem to sneak through are HTML. That's where
the idea came from, so I asked the rest of the devs about blocking
html mail and got an emphatic "please do it!" from all of them - thus
it was done.