Sam Darwin via Mailman-users writes:

 > Right, that is already the case. However equally important is
 > formatting via the sanitizer, not just removing malicious HTML.

Not clear what "sanitization" you want to suggest here.  Authors want
HTML so they can have more control over the presentation than offered
by Markdown (which most agents don't implement anyway).  Sanitizing
HTML likely breaks the intended presentation.  Fundamental features of
HTML such as links and automatic display of multimedia objects are
obvious vulnerabilities, but disabling those will not make your
HTML-loving users happy!

 > You are saying "All sorts of malicious malware can be attached to
 > email in other than HTML parts." What is the solution to this
 > currently?

Discard them or save them as attachments, usually as .bin with a
non-specific MIME type such as application/octet-stream.  Also, these
are image/* and application/* parts, and malware filters run by the
MTA know quite well what to do with them.  The problem with HTML is
that it's more amenable to social engineering than most such formats
(PDF is an obvious exception).

 > We have "Collapse alternatives" and "Convert html to
 > plaintext" enabled.  If one of those is relevant

Relevant to possibly malicious email?  As far as the documentation
goes, maybe it should be changed to mention that.

But the default for "Collapse alternatives" is True.  In the past most
HTML mail was bundled with a plain text alternative, so that would
take care of possibly malicious HTML parts.  OTOH, assuming that HTML-
only mail was deliberately configured that way by the sender, we did
set the default for "Convert HTML to plaintext" to False to respect
that intent, as it's likely that there is legitimate content that
can't be represented as plaintext or attractively presented as a
separate MIME part.  I think that logic is still probably valid.  And
as Mark said, the likelihood that malicious mail will be sent via a
mailing list is relatively low as long as it's set to members-only
posting.  So the current default settings seem like a good compromise,
and it's not obvious to me that it's worth discouraging changing those
settings if they're in demand from the subscribers and the list owner
is OK with that.

For Mailman the real problem is that doing more than we currently do,
and doing it well, would require construction of the DOM and a pretty
capable CSS implementation, with features driven by what the full
range of user agents implement.  It's a lot of work, and it's not
obvious what the benefit to most Mailman users would be, over and
above offering "collapse = False; convert = False" as an option and
defaulting to "collapse = True".


-- 
GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization)
Sirius Open Source    https://www.siriusopensource.com/
Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
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