"Remove These Headers" in MailScanner.conf

[Greg Matthews]

Jerry wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:46:11 +0000
> "Martin.Hepworth" <martinh at solidstatelogic.com> wrote:
>> What do other folk think?
> 
> Personally, unless I was setting the server up for my exclusive use, I
> would not want to block any of those headers by default. I am sick of
> software making arbitrary decisions on what I should or should not view
> or do. Unless it is a security problem, the sanitizing of email
> headers, content, etc should be left up to the end user. Offering the
> user the tools to do so is fine as long as they are not turned on by
> default.

except there is a security problem. The point is that spammers are using 
delivery/read receipts to verify their address lists. Verified lists 
then become much more valuable.

Also, there appears to be a bug in Outlook that will send receipts in 
certain circumstances even when configured not to. This was recently 
discussed on uk-mail-managers:

"We're currently migrating to Exchange 2007 and came across this a 
couple of days ago. There seems to be a bug in Outlook whereby if you 
access your email account using IMAP and delete a message that requests 
a read receipt, when Outlook next notices the message has vanished it 
generates the "Not Read" response back to the sender. This is 
irrespective of whether the user has chosen to respond to delivery 
receipts or not. We've also noticed the behaviour when Messaging Records 
Management deletes emails on the server.
....
We've logged a support case with MS, we'll see if we get a sensible 
response..."

> Case in point, at one time, perhaps even now, Google was blocking ZIP
> files that contained 'exe' files. They were also blocking encrypted
> files too. It did not take me long before I realized that I did not
> need a Nazi censoring my mail.

you lose. See Godwin's Law.

GREG

> 
> Just my 2¢.
> 
> 


-- 
Greg Matthews           01491 692445
Head of UNIX/Linux, iTSS Wallingford

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