Mon, 22. Mar 2004
I've noticed some effects of the virus attacks of the past months on the way I usually deal with email:
- My procmail recipes have become much more aggressive. Since I receive more than 150 virus mails a day I don't want to wade through them looking for false positives. All mails containing .exe/.scr/.bat/.pif attachments are going to /dev/null automatically. If you send me an executable attachment, I'll never read your mail, so don't wait for a response.
- White-lists have become even more useless than they've been before.
- The Bayesian spam filter I use sees so many virus mails in .zip attachments or bounces that it is starting to classify spam mails as non-spam if they don't contain a virus. By now I'm receiving more virus mails and bounces than spam. I haven't found a way around that, yet.
- I don't read any mailer-daemon responses anymore. This is really bad. Most if not all mailer-daemon mails are because of servers that have received a virus that forges the From header to look like one of my addresses, that's why I've stopped to pay attention to them. But this also means I may fail notice that a legitimate email I really wanted to send has not been delivered.
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