[Mimedefang] Great open letter about anti-virus, emails, bounces, etc.

[Brent J. Nordquist]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, David F. Skoll <dfs at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:

> In fact, I'm mulling over modifying MIMEDefang so that if any
> *_contains_virus function says there's a virus, the action_notify_sender
> routine will fail with a nasty log message.

What I've been mulling is that it would be so useful to recognize the
different flavors of bounce messages from the various mail systems out
there, so that then you could take action on those as a class (like oh,
say, dropping all those that have "Subject:.*Your details" etc. somewhere
in them).

That letter was well-worded, but the virus alerts are only half the story
here.  The bounce messages are more numerous; I'm hearing people start to
say that the whole concept of "undeliverable" messages may go away if mail
admins are forced to turn it off due to all the forgery going on.  And we
spend a certain amount of time pacifying nervous users reporting bounces
from "something I never sent".

-- 
Brent J. Nordquist <b-nordquist at bethel.edu> N0BJN
Other contact information: http://kepler.acns.bethel.edu/~bjn/contact.html
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