[Mimedefang] White paper on futility of replying to viruses?

alan premselaar alien at 12inch.com
Fri Jul 16 14:41:24 EDT 2004



Ben Kamen wrote:
> sounds like a bad idea... imagine all the admins you would be emailing 
> who would actually care or be allowed to do anything else due to 
> politics.. ugh.
> 
> Email is just a mess.
> 
>  -Ben
> 
> 
> Kenneth Porter wrote:
> 
>> I seem to get a lot of automated replies from virus scanners 
>> responding to forged viruses with my address as the sender (typically 
>> lifted from a newsgroup posting). It would be nice if I could fire off 
>> a link to that postmaster pointing to an article explaining why 
>> auto-replies to a virus are a Bad Idea. Does anyone know of any good 
>> articles explaining this? (And is it an equally Bad Idea to auto-reply 
>> to such an auto-reply? ;) )
> 

I just train all those emails as spam (for my personal email domain) 
since I don't use any computers that are capable of being infected by 
those viruses.  since those messages are now just like crying wolf, even 
if they were legit virus notifications, the impact is nearly 0.

I also scan all outgoing mail for viruses, and i reject (with a 5.x.x 
error) any messages containing viruses... that way if it really *IS* 
legit mail, the sender will have some idea that the mail wasn't 
delivered.  I'm not really prepared to discard any mail yet...



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