[TriLUG] Blocking Attachments in Exim/A really wack network admin

Tanner Lovelace lovelace at wayfarer.org
Mon Apr 12 09:10:23 EDT 2004


David A. Cafaro said the following on 4/12/04 9:05 AM:

> Ah, true, missed thought that.  You would be rejecting before you even
> fully accepted the email transfer (during the SMTP connection from the
> relaying mail server or the virus itself if it ran it's own SMTP).  The
> reason I misunderstood that was I usually think of virus scanners
> working on the email after it has been accepted from the SMTP
> connection.  You setup would work, but might take some serious
> processing power and time slices on the SMTP side since you would have
> to partially accept the connection, scan the majority of the email
> before it's been completely transfered, then reject it at the end.  When

Right, which is why I don't have a full virus checker scanning it.  Instead,
I just have some very good regular expressions inside postfix itself.  That
way it's just postfix doing the scanning and not waiting on something
like spamassassin.

> I was talking about silently dropping it, I was talking about after it
> has been accepted by the SMTP server (thus not violating the SMTP spec,
> I believe) but before delivery to the users email folder.  And you are
> also right, ISP should not do this dropping with out explicit permission
> from the user (though private companies should be able to do it if they
> want, it's their email).  Also I am still definitely against the whole
> sending notices back to the email sender if you server virus scanner
> sees a virus.  More often than not the sender listed is not the infected
> person, and just causes confusion and more junk email.

Agreed.

Cheers,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace       | Don't move! Or I'll fill ya full of... little
lovelace at wayfarer.org | yellow bolts of light! - Commander John Crichton



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