Signature Stripping and anon servers

Article 17408 of alt.privacy:
Xref: netcom.com alt.privacy:17408
Newsgroups: alt.privacy
Path: netcom.com!gkremen
From: gkremen@netcom.com
Subject: Signature stripping and anon servers?
Message-ID: <gkremenCtMrv2.190@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 03:18:38 GMT
Lines: 25


I am new to this group so please forgive my ignorance.  I am looking at
putting together a local anonymous server.  However, people here have
signatures that might give them away.  They also forget that they have
signatures.  Is there a general (and I know that you can't cover all
cases) of stripping signatures?  What I was thinking about was:


Read last 100 lines of message
  if a line begins with --
  then if no MIME v1.0 header present
       then delete last 100 lines
       else if -- is part of part-boundary
            then ignore
            else delete last 100 lines


Does anyone have any gross problems with this methodology?
If so or if you have any suggestions, send mail to me
and I will post the best stuff.


Thanks in advance.

Gary

Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 09:08:02 -0700
    From: gkremen@netcom.com (Gary Kremen)

    . . .

    Read last 100 lines of message
      if a line begins with --
      then if no MIME v1.0 header present
           then delete last 100 lines
           else if -- is part of part-boundary
                then ignore
                else delete last 100 lines
    
    Does anyone have any gross problems with this methodology?

Yes.  I believe that your pseudocode is buggy.

First, I believe that you should match the regular expression
"^--[ \t]*$" rather than just ``line begins with --''.

Secondly, you should have ``delete everything from the matching line
to the end'' in place of ``delete last 100 lines''.  For this message,
your algorithm would delete the entire message.

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