[OT] [Samba] SPAM

[Mark Warner]

I would have to agree with Tom. I use Mozilla 1.5a "out of the box", and 
I have never seen a spam or virus message on this list. Granted, I've 
only been on the list for about 8 months.
Further, I would suggest using SpamAssassin, MIMEDefang, and ClamAV for 
those of you that have control over your mail servers. MIMEDefang does a 
fine job of stripping out potentially harmful attachments. SpamAssassin 
marks potential spams with a spam score, and you can use Mozilla's 
in-borne filters to get rid of them. ClamAV simply blocks known viruses, 
and the users never even know they exist. Given that, our mail server is 
a busy little bee with all of the filtering and scanning, but those with 
an IT budget of at least $700 can build a pretty stout email server.  
Also, a simple Antivirus program on each Windows desktop will round out 
your virus protection nicely.

In the end, admins can do very little to prevent a determined user from 
destroying their PC's. Even with all of the above protection, we have, 
in our organization, a user who somehow infects himself with 5 
different, sometimes ancient, viruses a month. Generally he contracts 
the more debilitating kind, and his PC must be rebuilt. However, with 
the above protection, those viruses have yet to spread outside of his box.

In my opinion, it boils down to this: Spam protection is within the 
realm of the individual mail administrators, not the mailing list 
administrators. If your mail system is vulnerable to spam virus attacks, 
you need to do some work on your systems, not gripe at the mailing list 
admins and members about it.

-Mark.


Tom Dickson wrote:

> If you really don't like the virus spam, may I recommend www.mozilla.com
> ? It's mail filtering works great for me, and all my little virus splats
> go right into the junk folder.
>
> If you really really insist on using Microsoft software and don't want
> to ever see a virus spam, then post to the group from a one-time hotmail
> account, and read the replies in the list archives.
> (http://lists.samba.org) Note that the list archive very rarely has any
> of this virus spam in it.
>
> The only other solution is to LART every clueless user out there; but
> this is unlikely to work: sysadmins have been trying for 20 years with
> no results.
>
> - -Tom