Re: [seul-edu] Mail Filters

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Bill Tihen -- TECHNOLOGY wrote:

> We recently had a word virus end up in one of our user's
> docs.  She had to save it and open it to get it.  So I
> figured maybe there is a way to force people to send
> only rtf files and dissallow .doc and excel file (rtf
> and tab deliminated files should work).  Anybody have
> any experience doing this in a school.  

Not in school, but we use Exim to filter out dangerous attachments here.
There is a system filter somewhere on www.exim.org or linked from there
which will do it for you.

In the workplace, I'd suggest that the application of a baseball bat to
the user concerned ought to be enough to prevent further occurrences of
this. In school, I suppose that's not an option, but if you're not going
to agressively filter out dangerous files, you could formally adopt a
policy similar to http://www.infradead.org/~dwmw2/attachmentrules.txt or
intercept dangerous files and forward them to a spare machine which isn't
otherwise privileged to use the network - so that the potential damage is
limited. This latter option also has the effect that it makes receiving
such files a pain for the user, so they're more likely to ask the sender
to use a sensible format instead.

--
dwmw2