[Esa-l] Files to poison: Hybris

[Murray Crane]

At 20:11 13/12/00 -0800, John wrote:
>If it's not business related, my answer is "tough."

Mine too.  I get flack from the lower levels of my userbase because of the 
poisoned file I use (to summarize the diffs against the 'default' list:
*.asf, *.avi, *.bat, *.cmd, *.com, *.exe, *.mov, *.mp[g|eg?]?, 
*.qt[m|vr?]?, *.scm, *.scr, prolly some others I've missed)  Quite 
draconian, I think you'll agree, but in the business we are in 
(recruitment) there is no reason for members of staff to *regularly* 
receive files of these types.

>We don't need a zillion copies of frog-in-a-blender or elf bowling
>coming in through our mail system at work. If it's business related,
>they make arrangements to upload it to our FTP site (all of our
>clients have accounts).

I can but agree.  If only I had the gumption to make internal mail go 
through the sanitizer as well to stop the trade in .EXEs inside of the 
company I'd have a shed-load of disk space returned to the servers.

I don't *yet* have the FTP option (I'm working on it though...), so I get 
clients to send things through me (as the postmaster) if it's on the 
poisoned list.

>Your boss should back you up if you let him know that business-related
>.EXEs are coming in at about one per year.
>
>BTW, my users call me the Email Nazi. :)

I remind the higher-ups about Mellisa and ILOVEYOU when I start getting 
flack and it all dies down very quickly.  They have the sense to see why 
the approach I take with the sanitizer is, in the long-term, the best approach.

I don't want to know what my userbase calls me :-)  No doubt it involves a 
few expletives.

Kind regards

Murray Crane
SYSADMIN
Longbridge International Plc