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Frustration with spurious posts.

Alan Kennedy alanmk at hotmail.com
Sun Jul 6 08:54:40 EDT 2003 
Alan Kennedy:

>> Bringing an end to the problem would probably involve a fairly
>> substantial admin effort on the part of the python.org admins.

JanC wrote:

> No, it's the admins that run an antivirus on their mail server or the
> users that use broken anti-virus/anti-spam tools that should fix their
> system.

Ah but, we all know that is never going to happen. There are just too
many admins out there who either don't know how or are unwilling to
deal with this problem.

There are two ways to sort the problem out

1. Get *all* of the admins to configure their setups to stop bouncing
virus emails.

2. Sort it out at the python-list/Usenet gateway.

Since #1 is unlikely to ever happen in practice, #2 is the only viable
option available. Hence my statement.

> It's plain stupid and irresponsible to bounce or send a mail back to a
> *forged* and often randomly shuffled "From:" address, doubling or
> tripling the mail traffic generated by the virus itself.  :-(

Yes, it can be indeed thoroughly silly, especially if the from address
is forged.

But if an email is sent from an individual to an individual, then such
"you sent me a virus!" emails can be very useful information. It's
only when an email address is associated with lots of subscribers that
it becomes a problem. Or, as you pointed out, when the from address is
forged.

Is there some sort of mail header that these virus checking gateways
could examine, to see if the email is from a list, rather than an
individual, before it sends these emails? Maybe we need to invent one,
e.g.

X-Dont-Send-Me-Virus-Reports: YES

> "Be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving."
> RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet - section 3.9

Do this mean we should quietly tolerate the "you sent me a virus!"
emails?

;-)

-- 
alan kennedy
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