Re: [Exim] Re: Limit on message size for filtering?

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 01:57:54PM +0100, Karl Eklund said:
> Tim Jackson <lists@???> writes:
>
> > No, please drop them instead. It's alright for you to say "ah, never
> > mind" (or words to that effect), but it's not you who's going to be on the
> > receiving end of your collateral spam!
>
> The consensus here seems to be to drop them, so I will change it. The
> cons of dropping them are mostly theoretical (not 'polite' to delete
> stuff with no notice) but in practice, I guess it's much better.

If you can't reject them at SMTP time, then you need to drop them.

> > Better still, upgrade to Exim 4 and you can do it "properly" (if there is
> > such a thing). It will be worth your while, honest - not only can you sort
> > this problem, but you'll have all the brilliant new features to play with
> > too. It's not that far off 2 years since Exim 4 was released (I'm pretty
> > sure very useable betas were around this time in 2001)...must be time to
> > upgrade, surely?
>
> As people have assumed the reason why I use Exim 3 is that I'm using
> Debian and I will at the latest upgrade as soon as the next version of
> Debian is released.
>
> In what way can this type of messages be handled more properly in Exim
> 4?

Many things are MUCH easier to do in Exim 4. It's not that it's
impossible in Exim 3, it's just that Exim 3 does not have the underlying
features and extensibility that make all kinds of filtering and
manipulation MUCH MUCH easier. Square peg in round hole kind of thing,
where in Exim 4 there are lots of different shapes of holes and you can
define your own shapes for just about any kind of peg you can come up
with.

Using the Exiscan patch, I reject virus notification messages as well,
as this is exactly the type of collateral spam we are trying to avoid in
the first place.

If enough people do this, unenlightened admins that enable virus
notifications may finally "get it" and turn that "feature" off.