Re: [Asrg] Permission-based antispam-antivirus solutions

[John Kodis <kodis@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 06:50:36PM -0500, gep2@terabites.com wrote:

> Programmers and sysadmins, and people who started using email before
> MIME was introduced, tend to dislike HTML email.  Other people see
> the ability to use boldface and italics as normal features of any
> text-editing environment (which they consider their MUA to be).

Even so, HTML is the wrong tool for the job.  A better approach is the
text/enriched MIME Content-type described in RFC 1563 at
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1563.html 

This provides all the formatting that someone composing a simple email
message is likely to require (and then some), but without the bloat
and security risks inherent in a full HTML rendering engine.  It also
produces mail messages can be rendered well by text-based email
clients such as mutt, and which are still fairly legible even as raw
text due to the lack of " " strings which seem to make up the
bulk of many HTML email messages.

> If you want FULL text-handling features, then you can send LaTeX or
> Word (or whatever) documents as attachments (and thus enable
> attachments) for those people you trust to send you that kind of material.

Exactly right.  This is simply a matter of using the correct tool for
the job at hand.

Unfortunately, restricting email content type seems unlikely to have
any long-term impact on spam, as the spammers will simply adapt their
behavior to whatever content type is most likely to get their message
across.

-- 
John Kodis                                    Goddard Space Flight Center
kodis@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov                      Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
Phone: 301-286-7376                                     Fax: 301-286-1771

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