On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 13:02 -0500, Radu Hociung wrote:
Well, why would I care if an MTA sending the virus can't get the virus
out? That would be a good thing <G>.
:) Right. But the good mail gets backed up in the queue too, and that is
not a Good Thing ;)
Either way, legit mail being delayed and MTAs overloading because they
are queueing viruses is the fault of the virus, not of SPF. If SPF
wasn't being checked, the flood of virus related email would still cause
legit mail delays and MTAs to queue viruses.
I can't even start to list the number of things that are wrong with "SPF
is bad because it made my mail server slow down during a virus attack,
so I'm disabling SPF". There's always education (or clue sticks) to fix
that broken perspective.
"Open relays are good because they allow me to send my legit email when
my own mail server is bogged down because of a virus attack."
Besides, the next version might quote text found in the mailbox, or even
in mailing list archives on the internet, and make up legitimate looking
emails of variable length, so it won't be so easy to filter out of the
outgoing/incoming mail queue.
So the fix is to disable the thing that is (hypothetically) slowing it
down, SPF, so your own mail queue gets cleared out and infects other
sites so you can accept MORE virus email? Just because it's hard to
clear out the mail queue, doesn't mean you should just let the virus
mail go through. This could be considered gross negligence.
--
Andy Bakun <spf(_at_)leave-it-to-grace(_dot_)com>