Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2001 17:50:03 -0500 (EST)
From: James M Galvin <galvin(_at_)acm(_dot_)org>
I think it would be a mistake for the IETF to try to get into the
business of protecting mailing list subscribers from virses.
I'd sure like to understand your motivation for this point of view.
Since it is, in fact, relatively straightforward to put virus scanning
in front of message distribution I would think this is exactly what we
want the IETF to do, or more precisely the IETF Secretariat to do for
those elists they manage. The only real work in such an activity is
keeping up with the "virus updates".
Well, such "virus protection" is utterly irrelevant to me; I use a Unix
and Linux machines to read my e-mail, and so I don't have stupidly
designed mail user agents.
I agree that filtering multipart messages goes too far; they can be
useful. However, I do believe it would be fair game --- especially for
the IETF mailing list, to filter multipart messages containing Microsoft
documents and executables. There really is no excuse for sending any of
that nonsense onto the IETF mailing list, and that would nicely avoid
sending any viruses onto the IETF list without needing to run
platform-specific virus detection software, and requiring the
secretariat to keep such software up-to-date. (For bonus points, it
would be nice to have filtering software to deal OutLook's annoying
habit of sending both HTML and ASCII TEXT messages for messages there
was absolutely no need to send to the HTML...)
I do have to admit, the more I get spammed with this Microsoft-specific
mail-garbage, the more sympathy I have towards those who've argued for
simply filtering all messages that orignated from Microsoft MUA's (which
would also solve the problem), although arguably that penalizes the
wrong set of people --- the users, instead of the idiots who wrote the
MS-MUA's in the first place.
- Ted