[Mimedefang] MIME type message/partial

Paul Murphy pmurphy at ionixpharma.com
Tue Nov 9 12:25:56 EST 2004


Jan-Pieter,

On my system, your message shows a header which contains:

X-message-flag: *** MICROSOFT OUTLOOK FATAL ERROR 15: PRESS ALT+F4 TO CONTINUE

This also appears in yellow in the Outlook session as a header section to the
message viewer - is this part of your message, or something which my Outlook
added?  Google has exactly one incidence of this header, in a mailing list for
NNTP...

Anyway, you wrote:

> Also, I believe you are reasonably safe as long as you force the first
> part of the message/partial to be "big enough". Say, 1MB or larger.
> 
> This does provide a few theoretical openings for a virus to slip
> through (eg, sending a large enough zip file, so with the end of the
> zipfile missing, it cannot be easily extracted).

I live in fear of the day when all spam and viruses arrive with a 1Mb image or
text attachment first, followed by  a nasty executable or an HTML alternative
part which is smaller and more spammy.  Given the recommendation to only scan
larger files, many of us could be in trouble.

For now, there is no reason at all to allow partial messages through - if a
sender uses them, persuade them to change, or write a re-assembler in your
filter.


Best Wishes,

Paul.
__________________________________________________
Paul Murphy
Head of Informatics
Ionix Pharmaceuticals Ltd
418 Science Park, Cambridge, CB4 0PA

Tel. 01223 433741
Fax. 01223 433788

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