To send or not to send 'virus in email' notifications?

Wed Aug 20 18:47:37 UTC 2003

on 8/20/2003 9:25 AM Joe Maimon wrote:

> Considering the amount of email traffic generated by responding to 
> forged  virus laden email from culprits like sobig should email virus 
> scanning systems be configured to send notifications back to sender or not?

The least-harmful yet still-compliant mechanism is to reject the message
during the transfer stage, instead of during the delivery stage. If the
victim is sending their mail using an MTA that is built into the worm,
that should be the end of it. If the victim is sending the mail by way of
a real server (eg, a submission server or a smarthost), then the transfer
rejects will probaly still result in delivery failure notifications being
sent to the spoofed sender address.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/