Block outgoing mail w/ bad addressing

[Jethro R Binks]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Matt Kettler wrote:

> That said, going back to the original context of the thread, the OP was 
> looking to handle this for typos of his own domain. I can definitely see 
> reasons to do it for your own domain.
> 
> I'd certainly do this if someone was typo-squatting MY domain.
> 
> What would you do as a business in this case?
> 
> What if the typo-squatter was actually a competitor? Sure you'd take the 
> domain back with a trademark infringement case, but that takes time.
> 
> What if in the meantime they decided to set up a MX that would just 
> accept all the mail sent there from your network and funnel it into a 
> report to their director of marketing?
> 
> Would you take the risk of one of your users fat-fingering your domain 
> name in an internal email and giving a competitor potentially sensitive 
> company information? (accounting/sales/project status reports)

I'd educate my users and provide them with tools to minimise the chance 
that their fat-fingers wouldn't be detrimental to their employment status, 
but I certainly wouldn't attempt to 'fix' this in an MTA (who is going to 
shout that this is off-topic this time?); like provide them with an 
address book of company contacts.

Neither does this 'solution' prevent people outside the company sending 
that sensitive company information to the typo-squatting competitor, so 
you might be stuffed anyway, nor prevent fat-fingered employees from 
entering the incorrect email address in the myriads of places they may 
enter it outside your realm.  So you are only 'solving' a fraction of the 
problem.

I see outgoing mail to hotmial.com and similar all the time, but I don't 
do anything about that either.  Neither do I put in extra aliases for 
some-role at strath.ac.uk, because someone thinks that some one might send 
email to some_role at strath.ac.uk instead.  Users have to take 
responsibility for paying attention some time.  The sooner they learn the 
better, then you don't have to have some ugly kludge knocking around for 
years.

Jethro.

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Jethro R Binks
Computing Officer, IT Services
University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK