Internet problem every year

[Per Starback]

First of all I'm sorry that virus got through to the list.
I hope it didn't cause too much problem.  In particular I hope noone
actually ran it!

Frank Stajano wrote:
> I can only confirm this (and advise people to get an as-you-download virus 
> scanner like the one I have). Question is: how come this idiot was (a) 
> allowed to post from such an address and (b) allowed to post a binary at all?

Morten Lied Johansen replied:

> Can't answer the first, but if I'm not mistaken, Mailman (which drives
> this list) only puts a limit on the number of lines a mail can have. It
> can't see if something is binary or not.
> 
> I suspect that the limit is set to 0 which in Mailman means unlimited...
> If Per has set it to something else, then it probably isn't low
> enough...

As for (b), the maximum was 40Kb.  That has usually stopped all binaries
(and often quoted whole digests) but seldom anything else.  But you are
right; I will lower it some more, to avoid small binaries like this one.

(Of course it would be better if Mailman supported filtering on MIME
types.)

As for (a) it's my fault.  List members post legitimate messages from
other addresses than their subscription addresses now and then, so
some manual attention is required to let messages through now and
then.  Therefore I dared to turn off only-subscribers-may-post while I
was gone for eight days (in Egypt), but, alas, I forgot to turn it on
again when I was back.  Sorry!
-- 
Per Starback <starback at ling.uu.se> <http://stp.ling.uu.se/~starback/me.html>
 "Life is but a gamble!  Let flipism chart your ramble!"