[clug] Strange email messages

Matthew Hawkins matt at mh.dropbear.id.au
Wed Sep 24 10:27:43 EST 2003


Nemo -earth native- said:
> Convince your ISP to filter emails with .exe (and other windows
> executable types) attachments at the mailserver end.
>
> We (Goldweb) do and have done so for at least a year with easily more
> compliments than complaints. It's not hard to put a very legitimate
> case forward that you will NOT EVER get any .exe attachments in email
> that you want, and therefore are quite happy for them to be
> automatically filtered for you. It's a much harder case to convince
> this policy to be implemented though... but it can't hurt to ask,
> right? Afterall, there is precedent. :-)

I thought I would expand on this a little.  It's been closer to 2-3 years
(how time flies!) that Goldweb has implemented such functionality - I know
as I prompted them to do so as it was proven for a long time beforehand at
the company I worked for to be a very very good thing.
Working for a commercial organisation dealing mostly with Government and
large business you'd think that there would be some resistance to
draconian measures such as rejecting any mail off the bat with a
MS-Windows executable type attachment.  However, we (Intology) found that
clients were more impressed that we took the problem seriously and had
taken measures to protect ourselves and them, especially since it was such
a simple thing, from all the problems Microsoft Windows introduces with
its susceptability to constantly infecting computer networks with viruses
and causing denial of service and so forth.Clients had no qualms resending mail that needed these things inside zip
attachments, and some even remarked that it would probably make the mail
smaller and "friendlier" anyway. (note that the mail server scans files
inside zip attachments for viruses also).  It was a win-win situation.
-- 
Matt





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