[clug] Interesting MyDoom bounce

[David Price]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 03:29:08PM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> > Yes, but it is not up to the receiving end to decide whether a message is
> > to be discarded.
> 
> Yes it is.  There are no circumstances when the error will do anything
> useful, and it is likely to generate more noise.  It is a net loss.
> Viruses should be silently dropped.

Fair enough... if the receiving end knows that it's a virus, it should
just drop it, but in this case it doesn't know that.  I see two ways
it could know something is a virus, either by having virus scanning
software installed (probably expensive.  Are there any free virus
scanners that run under *nix?), or by custom rules that detect some
signature of the virus (same as the first really, but requiring system
administrator time to write instead of money to purchase).

In any case, unless the receiving mail server can be absolutely
certain that the mail is a virus, it shouldn't be dropped.  Much as I
hate receiving email with MS format attachments, I'd really rather not
have them silently dropped.

Just my opinion,
David