Removing only Windows executables

[G. Armour Van Horn]

Miguel,

I'd love to be doing support on your network!

If a user in the Oak Harbor office of one of my clients needs an executable
file installed on his machine, I normally confirm that he will be at his
desk for ten minutes, e-mail the file to him, and then walk him through the
installation over the phone. Total billable time, probably fifteen minutes.

Under your management, I would make sure I had the user's password in case
he wasn't there when I got to his office, burn the executable to a CD, drive
the 50 miles to Oak Harbor, install the software, probably get stuck for an
extra half hour dealing with other trivial issues, and then drive home.
Totable billable time, at least three hours.

So it's easy to understand why this policy would be a really good idea. Of
course, from the perspective of the stockholders the managers sponsoring
this policy should be taken out and shot, but that's hardly a reason for us
SysAdmins to oppose it.

Van Van Horn

Miguel Koren O'Brien de Lacy wrote:

> Excuse my ignorance in this. I have mail scanner running perfectly for
> about 10 months now (did not upgrade yet) and since there were no
> problems with it (set and forget), I have gotten "rusty" in my mail
> scanner skills. I have a situation in a network where it is desired to
> scan all mails but to completely block Windows executable files. Don't
> even need to scan them, just to remove them. Management has decided that
> no one should receive executables The important fact here is that this
> is valid even if they are zipped or renamed. I'm not talking about a
> batch file but just EXE or COM for example. I would need to determine
> from the file header if it is an executable Windows binary or not. Is
> this possible with mail scanner in the current version? If not does
> anyone have a suggestion?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Miguel

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