[Mimedefang] Notifying virus recipients

[Steffen Kaiser]

On Fri, 16 May 2003, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> didn't actually make it to a recipient ("I have a virus?") and
> a recipient wanting to know that something sent to them was modified
> ("That company spreadsheet you sent was munged by virus scanning?")

Actually: I agree with recipient notification - any modification I make to
a mail is logged in the mail, either by header or by warning-attachment
(action_drop_with_warning, action_replace_with_warning). The only thing
dropped silently are suspucious chars in the header - although I wonder
these days, if this should become action_bounce, because several people
use some weired setup in order to forward mail from some off-house
maildrop to themselves in-house that always end up with "suspicious chars"
warning.

The arguments my bosses accepted to _not_ notify senders were these:

a) (posted here in the list) so many viruses use faked mail addresses,
think about notifying a dear colleague or some reputable person about such
virus and the argumentation about which mail and what attachment and that
this was no mistake by him/her, but yours ... .

b) if the recipient is notified, s/he can re-request the attachment, in
the cases that they know the sender and awaited something (which is rather
rare in my experience).

c) to notify in-house senders is OK. :-)

Bye,

-- 
Steffen Kaiser