Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 15:23:25 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jruigrok@via-net-works.nl (Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven) Cc: gjb@gbch.net (Greg Black), hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Time to close the list? Message-ID: <200011021523.IAA07924@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20001102104527.A37821@lucifer.bart.nl> from "Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven" at Nov 02, 2000 10:45:27 AM
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> I personally prefer mailing the backarsed company producing this piece > of junk. > > I mean Precedence: bulk is a frigging standard. Technically speaking, a virus scanner is not a an autoresponder. In general, they tend to be configurable, and "delete and warn sender" is a common default option. Technically speaking, this is a correct option, even if it's annoying as hell on a list, particularly when people are obviously being hit and resending to the list. If this Peter person were to quit resending the damn thing every time he gets it (he clearly has a vulnerable client), then the problem would have been limited to one set of reports to one list by frightened antivirus software (the fear is based on the idea that the people who bought it won't see its value when it comes time to upgrade, unless it screams bloody murder each time just to say "aren't you glad you bought me?!?"). A technical soloution is probably to get the AV software vendors to agree on a lavelling standard, such as: AntiVirus-Id: In which they place the message id of the infected message. Mailing list software could look for this header, and do what it wanted (all one warning through, warn once itself, or quietly eat all messages with the header). Obviously, the IETF isn't involved, and obviously no one (well, I did, actually, last year, but I'm above average 8-)) has thought through the consequences of widespread AV software deployment in MTAs, and mailing list interactions. The real pain in the ass, of course, is that to standardize, there has to be a standard, so, like "X-Envelope-To:", we will probably now see a spate of gratuitously incompatable "X-" headers "designed" to solve the problem, like qmail and the infamous RFC violating (and gratuitously different -- stupid qmail morons) "Delivered-To:" and the less common "X-Frontier-To:" headers. Of course, virus "venders" will make the "Message-Id:" random, do that if one gets through, it still cascades during propagation, but at least this would be O(1) instead of geometric. Ugh. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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