EXIM - append advert - and UK legal disclosure requirement

[Alan Cox]

> 1) just add a header and a URL to the same advert on our web site 
> 		http://www.ringways.co.uk/gotopless.php


Right or educating staff or adding scripts to put it in a footer. You can
sort out an organization header anyway if you are doing this with your
company name, number and address on it anyway while you are at it. That
one is fairly easy to do with exim or by setting up users mail clients to
do it for you. In the HTML case its nasty because you can't just append.

An ugly ugly approach which may work providing you know your users are
not trying to subvert it would be to walk the HTML data backwards until
you find </body> and insert <br clear="both" /><hr><img src=....> etc
before the </body>. You would still need to use a mime library to put the
mail back together with the image for it to be seen but for text you
could avoid that complication. You'd also need alt= text for any blind
recipients, but that will slot into the document.

(That actually may be easier as the mail client can merge items without
messing up)

> 2) Add the advert as a UUENCODED file and hope the mail client decodes it

I'd expect it to go into spam filters and not come out if you do that

> 3) Convert the email to MIME

ditto but you've got a better chance and you can probably avoid
corrupting signed email or mixing your advert into a forwarded document.
We used to ship metamail which had some handy mime mashing tools but
those are now obsolete and unmaintained so you'd need to find another
mime library to do the work.

> This is something I have never considered. The section on Trading Disclosures 
> on the page below is an interesting one, and could impact on a hell of a lot 
> of postmasters.
> 
> http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/companiesAct/implementations/oct2008.shtml
> 
> Would just adding the company registration and address to the headers suffice, 
> or even easier, a link to the relevent page on our web site?

I don't know. However the Organization header on my email is there
because of that act which is why I've got bits to add headers to hand. I
don't in fact use them as the same mail client is used for both Red Hat
and my other business interests so I had to teach the client to stick
differing org headers onto differing mailboxes. Obviously thats one thing
to do for a single person setup but the sitewide config problem really
wants tackling from the centre.

I can't alas point you at any out of the box scripts for this, but would
also be interested to know what mime processing libraries turn out to be
good for this sort of mail reworking.


Alan
PS: What happens if someone in Quebec wins ?