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


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