1.8. How do I turn off HTML messages/attachments?

See also the Mailman FAQ entries at 4.13 How do I prevent MIME attachments-HTML-Viruses being sent to lists and 4.39 Mailman is munging HTML & MIME-formatted messages before they are sent out? (problems with Mailman 2.1.x footers) and 4.22 Messages that are translated from HTML to plain text are empty or have a body like ""-root-8e8Ta4- Permission denied".

In Mailman 2.1, on the admin page, go to the Content Filtering section. Change "Should Mailman filter ..." to Yes. If you leave the rest at default values, including Yes for "Should Mailman convert text/html parts to plain text?", your list will only distribute plain text messages with no attachments.

If you wish to have Mailman convert HTML to plain text, you must have lynx installed and accessible via the path or you must explicitly tell mailman where it is located via the HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND variable in mm_cfg.py

If you are using a Redhat/Fedora distribution, FAQ entry 4.22 will also apply 4.22 Messages that are translated from HTML to plain text are empty or have a body like ""-root-8e8Ta4- Permission denied"

Alternatively, if you have another program which can do the conversion, you need to explicitly provide the command to do so via the HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND setting.

Mailman 2.0.* has no MIME supports. You will need to use an external MIME stripping tool for Mailman 2.0.*.

  demime: http://scifi.squawk.com/demime.html
  mimefilter: http://ftp.br.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mimefilter/
  stripmime: http://www.phred.org/~alex/stripmime.html
  stripmime: http://www.clarity.net/~adam/stripmime/

Notes: There are two different tools called "stripmime".

MimeFilter is written (and packaged for Debian Linux by Davide G. M. Salvetti, who also packages and maintains the Debian Mailman package.

Typically such tools are used by either inserting them into the aliases used for the Mailman lists, or by having the Mailman aliases deliver to procmail which then runs the MIME stripper via a procmail recipe and then delivers the message to Mailman.

There is also a patch for mailman 2.0.8 at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/266543 from Geoffrey Dairiki.

Mailman 2.1.* adds some support for manipulating MIME srtuctures.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.