[Mimedefang] calling action_notify_sender() for viruses

James Ralston qralston+ml.mimedefang at andrew.cmu.edu
Thu Sep 25 17:29:01 EDT 2003


On 2003-09-11 at 14:07:46-0400 "David F. Skoll" <dfs at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, Cormack, Ken wrote:
> 
> > http://www.f-prot.com/news/gen_news/open_letter_10sept2003.html
> 
> That's an excellent letter.  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.

That strikes be as being perfectly reasonable.

However (in case you are considering it), I would argue that calling
action_bounce() after a message tests positive for a virus is a
reasonable thing to do.

Sites which don't want to risk losing legitimate mail may want to call
action_bounce() instead of action_discard() when a virus is detected,
even if the virus detected is one which is known to forge the envelope
sender.

Regards,

-- 
James Ralston, Information Technology
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA




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