North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Email virus protection

  • From: Jack Bates
  • Date: Wed Aug 20 15:45:51 2003

Gary E. Miller wrote:

I love guys like you.  All my customers once had (still have) admins
that filtered and cleaned their email for them.  Also added
firewalls for their protection.  Now they are my customers because they
do not want your protections.

I never understood ISPs that can apply a filter but not make an exception. All my filters, network and service level, have exclusions. The filters are designed to protect the network from the users. Less than 0.1% of my users do not want such protections, and those users are cleared of them.

In the last 3 days, I have received over 50 thankyou emails from customers concerning Sobig-F stripping. One user said that they wanted off filtering because they updated their anti-virus definitions once a week and that they were expecting an email from someone, but I'd stripped the attachment. It turns out that the user hadn't updated since Sobig-F released 2 days ago and since the from address was something he was looking for, he would have run the executable I'd stripped. I informed him that the file was viral, and he informed me that he'd like to keep the filtering. This is normal of most requests.

I will agree with you that there are many networks that deploy filtering and do not work with the customer concerning the filtering. To do so is poor business practice in my opinion. The problem isn't the filtering. It is the lack of contact with the customer.

-Jack