[Pan-users] Re: HTML Messages

[Duncan]

Ken Stanley posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 07:12:48 -0500:

> Just out of curiosity, since HTML is both a) a security risk, and b)
> annoying to people using Pan (thus, earning the sender a possible
> filter), why doesn't Pan just add an option to filter all HTML, if the
> message is something other than text/plain (to still allow people to
> send snippets or examples of HTML usage)? It shouldn't be much harder
> than a global search and destroy... err, I mean replace. <g> ;)

I've wanted stronger filtering/scoring, on more than the overview headers,
for quite some time now (since well before scoring was introduced when all
we had was filtering).  Acting on arbitrary headers (allowing the user to
fill in the header), on any header, on the body, or on the entire message,
even if it's only a binary keep/kill, is IMO far more useful than scoring
as opposed to simply filtering, and certainly something any decent and
most non-decent news readers (including OE) have in some form or another.

That's what I use with mail (kmail, here) to send HTML to the trash, as my
top priority filter, before even the ones that filter my family's mail
into its own folder, before the filter for my bank, before anything.  I'd
/love/ to have that ability with PAN.  The same feature could be used to
filter on all sorts of often unique headers (NNTP-posting-host,
organization, x-newsreader, etc, not to mention various objectionable
words in message body lacking in the headers) various abusers use in
various newsgroups.

Unfortunately, when I requested it, I was told yes, it was a 1.0 necessary
feature, but that it wasn't going to be front-burner for quite some time,
unless someone with the necessary skills was sufficiently motivated that
the patches to implement it "appeared".  Equally unfortunately, I don't
have the necessary skills at this point, or those patches would have long
ago been submitted.

As I said, I would have found that far more useful than scoring, as would
I'm sure many others, but it would seem those that find it so aren't
coders... and the coders have other priorities, like scoring (which is a
nice feature and all but not quite what I need...), and the currently in
process switch to a database backend (which /is/ needed, both for
scalability/speed/memory-usage purposes, and because it's a necessary
prerequisite to a number of other nice features).


Personally...

Now that I've switched to klibido for binary harvesting, that leaves PAN
for only my text groups.  Since then, I've been meaning to test knode for
text groups, as I believe while it's simply not viable as a binary news
reader (AFAIK it doesn't even do yEnc), I /believe/ it handles filtering
much like kmail does (tho that may be wrong as I haven't tried knode in
years), which would serve my purposes.  Since I happen to use KDE as my
desktop, and don't have any other GTK apps (just recently switched to
KDE's noatun from XMMS), it'd also mean I could unmerge gtk2 and its
related libraries, which isn't an insignificant consideration when I'm
compiling/emerging updates myself.

Still, I like PAN, as other than that it's quite a nice program, my best
choice until klibido came along to handle the binaries, since it automates
multi-server downloads, something planned for PAN, but one of the projects
held up until after the database backend work.  Also, I'm rather familiar
with it at this point, and reluctant to give it up.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin