On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Sandip Bhattacharya wrote:
> Another tiny suggestion. Till this wave of mydoom mails are over, you
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> can also configure your virus checker not to notify the sender and the
> recipient that a virus has been caught.
"Till forever", please!!!
If you're unwilling to accept the content: reject it, all of it, at
SMTP time. End of story. Once you've accepted it, it's too late to
do anything meaningful.
In some jurisdictions, indeed, interfering with the content (e.g
supposedly to filter out unacceptable content such as viruses or
pornography and pass-on the massaged result) seems to be a criminal
offence.
> I know that many management people have this problem about "what if
> an important mail is dropped silently?".
If the target MTA refuses the content, and the offering MTA fails to
inform the sender in an appropriate way, then the offering MTA needs
radical correction of a bug which makes it unfit to use in current
circumstances and for the foreseeable future.
That's not the responsibility of the target MTA, though. All it needs
to do is refuse to accept the item, fertig, basta. Fortunately, exim
makes that straightforward. All praise to its author.
