[Mimedefang] Re: Unsafe file types

Lee Dilkie lee at dilkie.com
Mon Dec 1 16:47:19 EST 2003


> At 12:13 PM 12/1/2003, WBrown at e1b.org wrote:
> >ACK!!! You are more right than you know.  I renamed a DOC file on my
> >windoze box to RTF and it opened right up in Word.  Then i
> noticed my fat
> >fingers entered the extension as .rth, and it still opened
> in Word.  How
> >F***'ED UP is that??

I'd like to voice another view altogether here.

On my mail server, I don't block any attachment's based on file extension. I
figure that the whole purpose of email is to communicate and I do my best to
help that. Blocking perfectly legitimate email that's carrying a "dangerous"
attachment extension is a bit silly. "Dangerous" is in the eyes of the
beholder. I'm willing to do virus scanning of attachments on the server but
after that, as far as I'm concerned, it's up to the user to have an up to
date virus scanner and to use the wetware between the ears when opening file
attachments. If they screw up their computer after all that, well, it's not
my problem.

My problem is trying to weed out the non-legitimate email in the first
place. That is, spam and email's containing known virus's. Blindly blocking
attachments based on file extensions is going too far IMHO.

my 2 cents,

-lee



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