Subject: Re: Eliminating Virus Spam

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 13:57:06 -0700 (MST)

> From: John Border <[email-masked]>

>     I am not that familiar with the details of how mailing list servers work. 
> Is it possible to configure a mailing list server (e.g. [email-masked]?)
> to do a virus scan on an incoming mail message before forwarding it to the
> mailing list, bouncing the mail message back to the sender if a virus is
> detected?  (Or, since From addresses might be faked, maybe just tossing it is
> the right answer.)  If such a capability doesn't exist, maybe it should...

No, such a nonsense capability should not exist, because the very notion
of an email virus exists only as an expression of gross technical
incompetence by software sellers and even larger and more culpable laziness
and incompetence by software buyers.  No one with competently run systems
fears Microsoft's email viruses, and not because they are dumb enough to
use incredibly bad junk such as ANTIGEN.

Still, there are other good reasons why the IESG should add something like
the following to sendmail.cf on odin.ietf.org to reject multi-part junk:

     HContent-Type: $>+Check_CT
     SCheck_CT
     R$*multipart$*              $#error $: 553 reject multi-part junk

No, I don't count the 27 virus warnings I've received so far this
today via IETF lists among those reasons.  Those should be handled
by unsubscribing with prejudice those responsible.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Scott Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2001 17:35:47 -0500

>      R$*multipart$*              $#error $: 553 reject multi-part junk

That seems rather heavy-handed; I've often found the vcard 
attachments to be quite handy, for instance.  The IETF produced the 
MIME standard that defines these things, after all.  The multipart 
mechanism is not itself responsible for the bad ways in which it is 
used.