"notify recipient" vs "deliver to recipient"?

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Julian,
   My other concern is privacy for the victim of the virus, in the case of
the mass-mailing worms that grab files out of "My Documents" and send them
on, infected.  Even after cleaning, the attachment may have private
information that the victim didn't want sent out.  A notification to the
recipient gives them a clue but doesn't divulge private information.

** Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D                         PHONE: 207-872-3659
** Senior UNIX Sysadmin, Information Technology    EMAIL: jaearick at colby.edu
** Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill,               FAX: 207-872-3076
** Waterville ME, 04901-8842
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Julian Field wrote:

> Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 17:53:34 +0100
> From: Julian Field <jkf at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
> Reply-To: MailScanner mailing list <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: "notify recipient" vs "deliver to recipient"?
>
> At 17:12 09/05/2002, you wrote:
> >   I presently have the following settings in my mailscanner.conf file:
> >
> >Deliver To Recipients = no
> >Deliver From Local Domains = no
> >Notify Senders = no
> >Notify Local Postmaster = yes
> >Postmaster Gets Full Headers = yes
> >Deliver Disinfected Files = no
> >
> >Basically the users don't see anything if infected, just the postmaster.
> >There is desire in my user community to have the recipient get notification,
> >like the postmaster does, when a virus has been punted on their behalf.
> >No delivery, just notification.  This would be a good idea; it lets
> >the users know that:
>
> What about all the messages which just have things like an infected
> attachment? MailScanner will always endeavour to deliver as much of the
> message as it cleanly can (one of its advantages over products like
> Amavis). Not all infected mail is generated by worms.
>
> So I just recommend you set "Deliver To Recipients = yes".
>
> >a) the message they were looking for *was* sent, just not delivered
> >    because of infection, or
>
> In the current code, they will know it was sent because they received all
> the uninfected parts of it, which is surely more use than just some
> notification that their incoming mail was thrown away on their behalf.
>
> >b) mailscanner is on the job and doing good work for them (a plug
> >    for mailscanner).
>
> Current code achieves this already.
> --
> Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
> jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
> Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
>                              Southampton SO17 1BJ
>