Auto-responding virus

Steven Patterson S.R.Patterson at soton.ac.uk
Thu Jan 17 18:07:54 GMT 2002


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Jules et al,

We've got a bit of a problem at the moment.  Local Postmaster is set to
"Serviceline at soton.ac.uk" (our "helpdesk" email address) in order that virus
warning emails go out with this address to which people can reply and ask
questions of our knowledgable and friendly staff ;-)

The problem is that there seems to be some virus out there somewhere which
automatically replies to any email by mailing itself back to the sender -
and
serviceline is getting flooded with (disinfected) auto replies.

Now I'm guessing that these auto-responding viruses aren't too clever, so my
suggestion is that a configuration option is offered to allow the setting of
a reply-to address on the various warning messages.  Then we can set the
from
to be a nice /dev/null account like "nobody" and set the reply-to to be
something a human being will read.  We can even include text in the messages
telling any real human out there that they should reply to the reply-to
address rather than the from address.

Alternatively, how about some sort of "complex header" option in the config
file which specifies whether the virus warning messages contain only the
body
text or also some user-specified headers - so you could write a
sender-report.txt along the lines of:

From: E-Mail Virus Scanner <nobody at soton.ac.uk>
Reply-To: $Config::Local_Postmaster (or whatever it is)
Subject: Warning: E-Mail viruses were present in your message $subject
X-Mailscanner-Info: $report $host $qid (or whatever)

This is to warn you that your message...
(etc)

The first blank line being the seperator between headers and body, as per
convention.

Just a thought, it's not a big issue.

Steve

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