[Mimedefang] OS wars... [was Viruses: Bounce or Discard?]

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Tuesday, September 30, 2003 8:14 AM -0400 "David F. Skoll"
<dfs at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:

> Legality or illegality has nothing to do with it.  Just as ISPs can charge
> for excess bandwidth use, they can charge for transmission of viruses.

But don't use the word "virus", as it's too subjective. Just list
characteristics (file name pattern, MIME type) that get to go through free
(text/plain), those that cost a high premium (anything executable), medium
(HTML, due to spam-scanning cost) and a low premium for all else (zip files,
etc.).

The price you charge is based on your support costs for each kind of mail,
which means you need to track those costs to know what to charge. You could
use MD to remember the interesting features (message ID, MIME types,
filenames, customer) in a DB and then associate filter time and any later
abuse reports to come up with a pricing structure.