Protecting from dangerous attachments

[Rod Willmot]

What are the best ways of keeping dangerous file-attachments off my mailing-list?

The basic way I've been using is just to limit file-size (to 40K...), but that's not perfect.

Mailman lets me catch or allow certain mime types/subtypes, but that's where I don't know what to list. I'd like to allow gif, jpg, doc, and xls files, nothing else. Or else catch and discard anything with the usual suspects (scr, pif, exe, bat, com...). Whichever one is best, how do I do that -- what are the required mime types/subtypes?

Thanks!

[jason]

I'd say allowing image/*, text/plain, and text/html will keep you safe without too many complaints. (If mailman doesn't support the * wildcard, use image/gif, image/jpg (and perhaps image/jpeg), and image/png and the most common images to send). You may also want to look up the mime types for things like PDF and Word files if you ever get those sent through list.

You can find a listing of all of the MIME types that your server recognizes on the "MIME Types" page in CP.

As for attachments/mime types to block: exe, com, bat, scr, pif, and vbs files are a good place to start...

--Jason