On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 04:26:40PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:It is perfectly acceptable to place an explanatory message in an SMTP REJECT message.
Acceptable, maybe, but I believe it's better to simply discard all viruses.
And most sane people believe you are wrong.
Why? Since all you achieve with rejects is indirectly causing a lot of "virus bounces" to appear at innocent bystanders.
No, you also guard against false positives.
If the virus delivers the email directly to your scanner - it doesn't matter what return code you give.
Agreed.
However, if the remote end is a real mailserver, either because the virus is programmed to send via the default outgoing smtp server, or because someone .forwards all mail to you, or maybe because there's a lower preference MX for some domain, or maybe even because some viruses abuse any listening port 25 that's willing, and one of those smarthosts to your server, then you will cause that other mail server to send a bounce to the wrong person.
That is not your fault. It is the fault of the remote mailserver. Educate them.
A common problem I see in the AV community is that they forget that *email* is a service. It must work. Antivirus is a cute little feature we tack on top to make life more convenient, much like anti-spam tools are added. But virus/spam blocking is a feature -- not part of the basic service. Please do NOT break the service. Reliable email delivery depends on not having messages get lost.
Damian Menscher -- -=#| Physics Grad Student & SysAdmin @ U Illinois Urbana-Champaign |#=- -=#| 488 LLP, 1110 W. Green St, Urbana, IL 61801 Ofc:(217)333-0038 |#=- -=#| 4602 Beckman, VMIL/MS, Imaging Technology Group:(217)244-3074 |#=- -=#| <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.uiuc.edu/~menscher/ Fax:(217)333-9819 |#=- -=#| The above opinions are not necessarily those of my employers. |#=-
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