Pop3 Proxy

[Gerry Doris]

> Yesterday I had a mass mailing virus get into the office.  At first I was
> quite surprised that it made it past Mailscanner.  I haven't seen a single
> virus in months (since I first installed Mailscanner).  After some
> investigation I found that it originated from someone in the office who
> was
> checking an external pop3 account.
>
> My first reaction was to block all external pop3 connections at the
> firewall.  My CT0 wasn't happy with that solution.  He thought it would
> cause to much of a disruption.  I had considered installing a pop3 proxy
> on
> each client machine (similar to Spam Assassign pro).  However that
> involves
> too much client configuration.  So my next idea was to setup a transparent
> pop3 proxy which would run some type of virus protection, and possibly a
> spam filter.
>
> Does anyone know of such an application?  Or has anyone used such an
> application either currently or in the past?  Reviews?
>
> Julian have you ever thought of creating such an application?  It would be
> great to have the same protection from external pop3 servers as I do on my
> own mail server.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Gary Morgan

I had a similar problem occur.  I became so confident that MailScanner was
catching all mail virii that I wasn't paying attention to the level of the
virus scanners running on my internal boxes.  My own daughter connected
directly to Yahoo mail (I didn't know she was doing that!) and downloaded
a file containing the Worm virus (multicolured worms start running around
the screen but otherwise harmless).  I've also read that the new Microsoft
virus is being passed through Kazaa files.

I went back and made sure that all boxes had the current level of virus
scanner installed.  Of course, after I did this there hasn't been a single
virus found!

The lesson is that you can rely on users to find new and creative ways to
mess things up.  I think you will end up using virus scanners on each box.


Gerry