Feature concept... "noisy viruses"?

[Rose, Bobby]

How many viruses are out there?  Isn't in the thousands and aren't most
of the non-forgers dead or rarely pass thru email?  I only see the
forgers hitting our mail router. 

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Matt Kettler
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 11:25 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Feature concept... "noisy viruses"?

The debates on the merits of virus notifications go back and forth all
the time, but that aside, I'm curious if an inversion of MailScanner's
current "silent viruses" feature has ever been considered.

Right now, I've got MailScanner set to never notify senders of viruses.
I do this to save myself from the hassle of having to rush and update
the "silent viruses" list every time a new worm hits the net.

However, there are a few (albeit somewhat rare here) viruses which don't
forge senders, or are pure file infectors without mass-mail capacity.
Some question the merits of notifying senders of these as well, but at
least in these cases one can argue that the notification is at least
correct and could prove useful.

I propose it would be useful to have a feature in which I can declare
which viruses should have a notification sent, instead of declaring a
list of which ones should not.

This gives me the benefit of not puking on other networks when new
viruses come out, as new viruses wouldn't be on the notify list until I
manually added it. Yet it does offer the ability to notify senders of
viruses of a specific list of viruses which are known to not use
forgery.

I've not seen a discussion of this before, but I could have missed it in
my scan of my archives.

Any comments, considerations that I may have overlooked?