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.
