rant about anti-virus and spam, MS flamed

[Matt Kettler]

At 05:36 PM 1/28/2004, David H. wrote:
> > If nothing else, you should walk away from that article realizing that it
> > is an absolute shame that MailScanner even has the feature at all. Default
> > disabled or not, it's a bad idea.
> >
>Says who? You? Or the other thousand people that have formed an opinion.
>I am one of those long time Administrators that is edcuated enough to
>know when to use a feature and when not to use a feature.

Ok, I'll be willing to accept I might be wrong, however I will ask you to
at least offer some evidence of my error.

Can you cite an example of when, at the present time, it is a good idea to
have a mailserver configured to auto respond to a sender and notify them
that a message sent contained a live virus infection?

I can't think of any.


>I am glad that
>there was such a feature, yet the current development on the Internet's
>global community, the Trends in Virus writing and maybe spamming seem to
>make it necessary to remove this option as popularity of MailScanner
>grows.

Yes, I'd agree the feature _had_ a purpose. However, in my opinion that
time has long since past. Forged sender viruses aren't a recent trend. I
can't think of a significant virus written since Sircam in July, 2001 that
did not forge From addresses. Certainly everything post Klez-e in January
2002 has forged From's. That's 2 years gone by.


And none of this should be construed as a reason to not use MailScanner, or
declare it to be garbage. It is however a suggestion that perhaps
MailScanner needs a bit of a "cleanup" to remove options that have no sane
or valid use in a modern world.