Dumb users spread viruses
Robert Boyle
robert at tellurian.com
Mon Feb 9 18:17:20 UTC 2004
At 12:24 PM 2/9/2004, you wrote:
Do you honestly think that any IT manager is going to be successful getting
an entire company to dump Outlook/Exchange and stop using anti-virus
software? Do you have an example (within the North American area of
interest to NANOG members) where this has actually happened?
>IMHO, if you can convince an Outlook/Exchange using company to dump MS for
>email, you can convince them to dump MS/Windoze OSs entirely, which is a
>much more complete way to solve this problem.
I have been using Eudora for Windows since v1.3. I am now using 6.011. It
works flawlessly and I have all my email for the past 10 years (3+GB in
100s of mailboxes). This is our corporate standard for email. We turn off
inline images, MS's HTML viewer and we don't allow automatic html downloads
and we don't allow executable HTML content. We strip all useless
executables on the mail server (com,exe,vbs,scr,shs,js, etc.) and all other
attachments are renamed so they must be renamed THEN opened. We have mail
server AV (AVAST - no bogus infected message replies) and desktop/server AV
(Norton AV Corp Ed) on all workstations. We have never had a single virus
or worm infection since 1995. I banned Outlook years ago. However, as we
grow and as Outlook adds more and more features, I am getting lots of
pressure to allow it. I allowed a few people to use it for calendaring and
task management (One-note) and they LOVE it and want to use it for
everything. I am VERY hesitant to allow this. I have been focused on
security for 10+ years. I am an engineer and I am also CEO of the company
and even I am wondering if it might make sense to allow use of Outlook for
email at this point. Microsoft has made a lot of progress with Office XP
and most features which caused problems in the past are off by default -
until the next exploit of course. :( Oulook simply has the features and the
usability that people want. As much as you may hate Microsoft for making
security an afterthought, their software is powerful, feature-rich and VERY
intuitive for people to use. So I guess my point is that after years of
resistance to Outlook, even I am reconsidering due to high user demand and
a void in the market for a robust group calendaring and task management
application. Does anyone have any pointers for me. Something that fills the
organizations needs and that will work with Eudora? Please help me resist
the siren song of Outlook 2003.
-Robert
Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211
"Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." -
Francis Jeffrey
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