All the lists I'm talking about are populated by academics, mostly in the humanities, and are, of course, subscriber-only posting. So it has been possible to simply forbid attachments; people mostly just send text anyway. 

It does mean, though, that with the advent of Outlook, which attaches its own files without telling the sender, that more and more subscribers encounter bounced posts and don't know what to do about it. Here, as in most situations these days, I see only bad news in the future.

-- Russ

-----Original Message-----
From: LISTSERV List Owners' Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Hal Keen
Sent: November-02-17 5:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: blocked attachments

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Russell Hunt" <[log in to unmask]>

> Yes, I just forbid attachments and (AFAIK) it doesn't seem to be doing 
> this. The listowner in this case is probably policing attachment types 
> too. I'm going to contact him.

The trouble is that the alternatives to forbidding and filtering attachments are
(a) list the allowed types--by MIME encoding, which is neither predictable nor restrictable; or
(b) allow them all.

If you can get away with forbidding them, that's great. I can't, so when policing the types failed, I wound up allowing them all.

The one type of attachment I'd dearly love to block is ZIP files, because they cannot be screened for viruses. But ZIP files can use a generic MIME encoding for application data that's also widely used for spreadsheet formats required by my lists.

If we could screen by file extension instead of MIME descriptions, we'd be a lot safer.

Hal Keen
 

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