Re: Archiving HTML mail

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> New contributors tend to send text/html.  We are currently rejecting
> such email, which is proving more and more problematic.  I think a
> change would be easier to justify if I can show that this will not
> break our mailing list archives (in the sense that they become
> incomplete).  We currently use mhonarc, and I don't think it copes
> well with such mail.  It certainly doesn't do the subdomain split.
> 
> Is it possible to archive such mail as well, possibly under separate
> subdomains to avoid XSS issues?

You can use "publicinbox.$NAME.filter = PublicInbox::Filter::Mirror"
in the config to blindly mirror everything, which I use for
public-inbox-watch.

I also added "--no-precheck" to public-inbox-mda recently which
disables the last of the mda-specific checks:
https://public-inbox.org/meta/20191016003956.13269-1-e@80x24.org/


text/html is currently shown inline as raw HTML since
https://public-inbox.org/meta/20191031031220.21048-2-e@80x24.org/
But maybe the HTML part shouldn't be shown inline at all in
multiparts parents.

Optionally piping HTML to lynx(1) or similar could be considered,
too (but definitely an option which is off by default)

FWIW, I suggest keeping your lists text-only so contributors can
flow between different projects more easily and not get blocked
by spam filters.  It's significantly more expensive to do spam
processing on HTML mail and less accurate IME.  Better to teach
contributors to optimize for low-end computers and limited
bandwidth situations :)

Also, public-inbox-watch is designed to work in parallel with
existing mailing lists.  I archive several lists (including
libc-alpha@sourceware and git@vger) this way with no special
permissions or access aside from being a regular subscriber.