Email virus protection

Wed Aug 20 19:42:57 UTC 2003

Gary E. Miller wrote:

> I love guys like you.  All my customers once had (still have) admins
> that filtered and cleaned their email for them.  Also added
> firewalls for their protection.  Now they are my customers because they
> do not want your protections.
> 

I never understood ISPs that can apply a filter but not make an 
exception. All my filters, network and service level, have exclusions. 
The filters are designed to protect the network from the users. Less 
than 0.1% of my users do not want such protections, and those users are 
cleared of them.

In the last 3 days, I have received over 50 thankyou emails from 
customers concerning Sobig-F stripping. One user said that they wanted 
off filtering because they updated their anti-virus definitions once a 
week and that they were expecting an email from someone, but I'd 
stripped the attachment. It turns out that the user hadn't updated since 
Sobig-F released 2 days ago and since the from address was something he 
was looking for, he would have run the executable I'd stripped. I 
informed him that the file was viral, and he informed me that he'd like 
to keep the filtering. This is normal of most requests.

I will agree with you that there are many networks that deploy filtering 
and do not work with the customer concerning the filtering. To do so is 
poor business practice in my opinion. The problem isn't the filtering. 
It is the lack of contact with the customer.

-Jack