Basically, I'd like fetchmail to be able to scan the text coming
through
from the POP as it's downloading each mail, and if a pattern is matched
anywhere (eg: "I send you this file*") then the connection to the POP is
terminated, the index of the message stored, then a reconnect, and upon
reconnection, a dele of the matched message. This is assuming a download
cannot be stopped, and the connection to the server maintained (been a
LONG
time since I read any RFCs on this subject!)
Aaaargh, no, no, no! Or something like that :>
If you want a virus scanner, then use a virus scanner (I'd strongly
recommend amavis - www.amavis.org). If you keep programs simple there is
less to go wrong, besides blocking on subject can provide a silly number
of
false positives, one example:
The company I work for filters web access. Amongst other things, URLs are
checked for "questionable" words. Suddenly I can't access
http://babelfish.altavista.com/ 'cos it contains the word "babe"...
Or what about that email from your partner just to say "I love you"...
Let's keep fetchmail doing what it's good at - downloading email. Leave
filtering to the other 2 dozen solutions out there.
Erm, I don't think you quite understood my point. I'm taking about trying to
find a cure for the problem of having huge attachments sent to me from an
infected machine (in fact, many infected machines at the moment). It's not
that I'm worried about my machines contracting a virus, it's the download
time! Many of these virii leave a signature in the body, not the head, which
is why I wondered if it would be possible to filter as the data was coming
down the pipe. There are no other solutions to this problem - it's nothing
to do with web filters or virus scanners.
I can see this isn't a popular idea though, so I'm writing an agent to do
this for my own system - it will run periodically to remove the infected
messages on the server, then start up fetchmail in non-daemon mode to
retrieve what's left...
Cheers,
Scott