[Mimedefang] Mimedefang 2.36 and how to drop a blocked attachment message - action_bounce?

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 10:25, Kenneth Porter wrote:

> > Except for the case of your local mail clients, virtually all others
> > will be sent through a relay so the SMTP reject is going to cause
> > a bounce message to be sent even though you push the work of doing
> > it off to someone else.
> 
> But who is doing the relaying?

Every office with more than a couple of PCs has an email gateway.
Once that gateway has accepted a message, it becomes responsible
for generating a bounce message if it can't deliver to the next hop.


>  If it's an ISP, then they're complicitly 
> feeding viruses to the Internet.

If that is how you describe delivering email without peeking into
the contents and deciding if they think the content is appropriate,
there are probably still ISPs that do that.  If you describe that
in just a slightly different way, it sounds like a good thing.

>  If it's an open relay, then bounces will 
> signal the presence of those, and present more justification for closing 
> them (for those few who think they're a good idea).

The relays don't have to be open, they are there for the PCs
in that organization. It would be great if they all ran
MimeDefang and a virus scanner.  They don't.  It would also be great
if everyone stopped running virus-prone operating systems and mail
programs, but that isn't going to happen soon either.  So, when you
issue the smtp reject there is a pretty good chance you are forcing
the connected machine to generate a bounce, and if it is a virus the
bounce will almost certainly go to an innocent bystander.

---
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com