[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]

RE: [school-discuss] viruses and the list



Thanks Leon,  You of course are correct!
I must admit to having sent those in a fit of rage.  I am an IT professional
for several organizations.  And the fact that people STILL don't have
up-to-date virus defs and programs on their personal machines fustrates me
so.  I am able to insure that every server under my controll, and every
desktop at my fingertips always is current/up to date on AV defs and MS
"critical" patches.  I have to spend many hours a week, just to keep stuff
like this from comming from MY users, and then to have a few who can't keep
the simple things working.

I do value the list and enjoy reading the progress that is made in the name
of M$-free higher education.

I appologize to all on the list.

-----Original Message-----
From: Leon Brooks [mailto:leon@brooks.fdns.net]
Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 12:13 AM
To: schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
Cc: Keith Best
Subject: Re: [school-discuss] viruses and the list


On Fri, 4 Jun 2004 11:47, Keith Best wrote:
> Please remove me from this list.  I have recieved more viruses threw
> this list than anywhere else in my computing journies.

If you have a look at the full headers (or View Source), an activity
which, I must admit, MS-Outlook doesn't encourage, you'll see this
header:

X-To-Get-Off-This-List:
  mail majordomo@schoolforge.net, body unsubscribe schoolforge-discuss

If you examine the mail headers on the viruses, you'll probably discover
two things:

 1. Every sender is using Outlook; and

 2. Some, possibly most of the viruses didn't come through the list,
    they just look like they did.

What the second point means is that you're probably not getting the
viruses through remaining subscribed to the list, you're probably
getting them from other MS-Outlook users with the list in their address
books, or in their Internet Explorer caches from having viewed the list
archives.

The implication is that unsubscribing won't help you.

I'm sorry that I can't comment on the viruses. I was getting a steady
diet of nearly half a thousand a day from various sources (peaking at
1000-1500 during major outbreaks such as MS-Blast) so I put the free
ClamAV scanner on my mail server (via AMaViS) and rarely see one now.

I see that your Toshiba laptop is sending mail straight through your
router and Bell South, but you're recieving mail via Yahoo. In order to
use ClamAV yourself, you'll need to set your laptop up for dual-booting
and get a Linux service like FetchMail to pull your mail from Yahoo to
feed it through ClamAV to your email client.

Reading your mail and browsing the web is *much* safer under Linux
anyway. I use and strongly recommend KMail on Mandrake Linux 10.0.

Cheers; Leon