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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Dumb users spread viruses
At 12:24 PM 2/9/2004, you wrote: Do you honestly think that any IT manager is going to be successful getting an entire company to dump Outlook/Exchange and stop using anti-virus software? Do you have an example (within the North American area of interest to NANOG members) where this has actually happened? IMHO, if you can convince an Outlook/Exchange using company to dump MS for email, you can convince them to dump MS/Windoze OSs entirely, which is a much more complete way to solve this problem.I have been using Eudora for Windows since v1.3. I am now using 6.011. It works flawlessly and I have all my email for the past 10 years (3+GB in 100s of mailboxes). This is our corporate standard for email. We turn off inline images, MS's HTML viewer and we don't allow automatic html downloads and we don't allow executable HTML content. We strip all useless executables on the mail server (com,exe,vbs,scr,shs,js, etc.) and all other attachments are renamed so they must be renamed THEN opened. We have mail server AV (AVAST - no bogus infected message replies) and desktop/server AV (Norton AV Corp Ed) on all workstations. We have never had a single virus or worm infection since 1995. I banned Outlook years ago. However, as we grow and as Outlook adds more and more features, I am getting lots of pressure to allow it. I allowed a few people to use it for calendaring and task management (One-note) and they LOVE it and want to use it for everything. I am VERY hesitant to allow this. I have been focused on security for 10+ years. I am an engineer and I am also CEO of the company and even I am wondering if it might make sense to allow use of Outlook for email at this point. Microsoft has made a lot of progress with Office XP and most features which caused problems in the past are off by default - until the next exploit of course. :( Oulook simply has the features and the usability that people want. As much as you may hate Microsoft for making security an afterthought, their software is powerful, feature-rich and VERY intuitive for people to use. So I guess my point is that after years of resistance to Outlook, even I am reconsidering due to high user demand and a void in the market for a robust group calendaring and task management application. Does anyone have any pointers for me. Something that fills the organizations needs and that will work with Eudora? Please help me resist the siren song of Outlook 2003. -Robert Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211 "Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - Francis Jeffrey
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