[FLORA.org HelpDesk] Re: flora-admin-help-digest V1 #34

[Hendrik]

Hi, greetings from Japan,

1. as a mailing list owner, i do not want to receive messages
of the type appended below.

Russell, am curious to know which reason you would see, in today's "hostile" mail environment, why your mail filter would not completely discard messages to the list that have executable (or for that matter, any) attachments? :-)

Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 00:36:00 -0400
Subject: [FLORA.org HelpDesk] listserv cross-breeding
adding people and lists to email lists.

Not really: it's a rather old trick. :-) Except that it does not do much damage any more, since subscriptions nowadays require an active confirmation via call-back. (In that context i am puzzled how the address of the person who complained, "Coach" <***@sympatico.ca>, could ever get on the list without him/her knowing it).



Anyway... keep up the good work!

Best regards: Hendrik

--



-
Message part of the FLORA.org HelpDesk: http://www.flora.org/flora/help/

[Russell McOrmond]

Post by Hendrik
Russell, am curious to know which reason you would see, in today's
"hostile" mail environment, why your mail filter would not completely
discard messages to the list that have executable (or for that matter,
any) attachments? :-)

The concept of an "executable" is operating system specific. Recipients
should be notified that an "executable" has been stripped so that they can
send the sender (where it is a legitimate file they wanted) to send it to
them some other way.

This applies to mailing lists as well. If a list manager wants to just
toss these messages into the big-bucket then it should be that list
manager and not the system that makes this choice. While I have been
pointed to programs like "stripmime", ideal would be a patch to Majordomo
(or some other mailing list manager) which put this type of feature in the
hands of the list administrator. I believe newer versions of MailMan can
do this, but I haven't spent the time to do the research.

If anyone has recommendations about such things, they are always
appreciated.



I know I'm repeating myself, but the simplest way to deal with hostile
"executables" is to:

a) Learn (and more importantly teach) safe computing practices that
include never installing programs on your computer that you don't need and
don't know the source of. People tend not to eat raw chicken that they
don't know how long it has been sitting outside in the sun or where it
came from, so why people install random programs onto their computer from
the net is beyond me.

b) Switch away from applications which automatically install programs
just by "viewing" an email. This is a fatal design flaw in this software,
contrary to the RFC's which define email attachments. Software that
violates these RFC's should not be allowed on the net at all, but
unfortunately the IETF doesn't have an enforcement arm to deal with
violations such as Microsoft Outlook.

This is not a case of blaming the victim. The victims are all of us
that get these junk messages, not the person who deliberately engaged in
acts that caused their computers to distribute these things. When that
raw-chicken-eater gets sick, they too don't receive much sympathy from me
;-)

Post by Hendrik
Not really: it's a rather old trick. :-) Except that it does not do much
damage any more, since subscriptions nowadays require an active
confirmation via call-back. (In that context i am puzzled how the
ever get on the list without him/her knowing it).

Sympatico.ca is the ISP of the telecom monopoly in Canada. They allow
users to choose their own addresses as long as they are unique. Likely
someone in the past using the very generic name "sale" joined the list,
they then gave up that address, and someone else requested it and got all
the mail that the old "sale" person had.

[Krishna E. Bera]

On Sat, 08 May 2004 08:01:44 -0400 (EDT)

Post by Russell McOrmond
This applies to mailing lists as well.
If a list manager wants to just toss these messages
into the big-bucket then it should be that list
manager and not the system that makes this choice.

Majordomo2 (in use on lists.ox.org for ottawa-activist-events)
does per-list filtering of messages based on regex and other variables.
It can also handle each part of a message separately,
e.g. tossing attachments or converting html to plain text.
It can be set to Deny (in the firewall sense, no feedback to sender)
messages containing binary attachments from non-list-members,
so now moderators don't have to sift through virus bounces.
I am still thinking about how best to handle
HTML-only emails and messages with duplicate HTML attachments,
in a way that educates list-members.

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Message part of the FLORA.org HelpDesk: http://www.flora.org/flora/help/

[Russell McOrmond]

Post by Krishna E. Bera
Majordomo2 (in use on lists.ox.org for ottawa-activist-events)
does per-list filtering of messages based on regex and other variables.

When I looked it seemed that MJ2 was in beta, only available via CVS,
and didn't have much in the way of user or administrator documentation.
I'm not sure how appropriate it would be until these issues are addressed.

Additional thoughts? (about MJ2 or other software)