Subject: type/length/value based e-mail list filters

From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 12:58:36 +0100

once upon a time, in a far off corner of a small field
in north london, a small CS department developed a cute
x.400 mail system, that incorporated relaying between most 
extant e-mail protocol channels (smtp, uucp, grey book etc)
and accomodated translation of multimedia content including
other mm formats than mime - 

its possible to configure a system like this to fan out e-mail
traffic onto a set of sub-typed or super=typed  sub-lists, applying a
set of configurable filters (actually applying the transitive closufre
of a set of filters) to the content en route....

it ought to be easy to re-configure a majordomo like tool to then
allow subscription to typed lists. this would allow us folks that dont
care about word viruses, but also dont care FOR receiving megabytes of
word garbage either, to receive only the text part of a message.

this seems more democratic (in the hand of the receiver) but more
scalable (does filtering nearer source) than proposals to date that
have been made such as enforced filtering of all types of content, or
whathaveyou....

the idea would be to use fitler languages as part of the subscription
process.....it could include length limits and other things if one
liked to allow people on the move with merely a PDA to be safe,
secure and performant too...it could even be role based if one wanted
to be trendy....and it could make the world a les globally manged, but
cybernautically more ecoliogically diverse, and therefore richer,
place

yrs
three gentleman from genoa

p.s. for those of you with filters configured to send virus reports
as recipient alerts to the LIST, be aware that if you are that stupid,
you are probably being socially engineered to get around all your
over-zealous defenses anyhow, so you are wasting not just our time,but
your own too.