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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Is there anything that actually gets users to fix their computers?
Kee Hinckley [04/10/03 13:01 -0400]: > I've played the user-notification game myself in fighting hoaxes (do > a search on [email protected] sometime--and consider what > happens when tens of thousands of people add it to their address book > and then forward the latest joke/hoax/virus to everyone in their > address book). I used to send auto-replies debunking the hoax--but For more fun, consider that you are [email protected], and get those horrible automated notices sent out by SpamKiller (now Norton [something], since NAV 2003. The one that generates complaints with subject UCE Complaint (Original Subject) and "I have received the attached unsolicited email ..." boilerplate in the body. Reply to that and you will, as likely as not, get your reply sent back to you and your upstreams as a spam complaint. Sending autoreplies to anything that the teeming mass of lusers out there send out is practically guaranteed to produce such an effect. > then they'd report them as spam to their ISP, and their ISP would > block my domain. Others would just delete them. Often the only way > to get their attention was to send mail to everyone they'd cc'd, and > ask *them* to contact the offender. First, you'd get your email address added to a whole lot of other "cc everybody on my address book" type lists. Another thing is that you stand a good chance of mailing a significantly non trivial number of people who are on that cc list for the same reason that you are - Outlook Express being set up to add all people that you reply to, to your address book. > been told right and left not to open mail from strangers (a > completely bogus concept, given that viruses tend to come from > friends). What I found was that they take that quite literally. Say what? I have received virii from people I don't know from Adam, from countries where I don't know anyone at all. > They either need to be contacted out of band, or their email software > needs to support a secure channel of communications that they can > really trust. Hotmail, for example, clearly marks mail from hotmail staff (service announcements etc) with a different colored text in the inbox ... I guess if you control the client your user uses (using a custom built web interface is one way, a customized browser / mail client is another way) ... But other than that, you could well ask for the moon. srs
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