Beginning Tuesday March 9th, 2004, the FNAL Email Gateways will stop delivering messages that are identified as containing a virus. These messages will be deleted at the gateway. Currently the virus is removed and replaced with a text warning from the postmaster and then delivered to the recipient.
Questions and comments can be addressed to the FNAL Postmaster via the Helpdesk-
helpdesk@fnal.gov
Why are we doing this?
The majority of infected mail that enters the site is designed to propagate the virus that it contains. User complaints about junk mail cluttering their inbox are very common and according to the users, "impede the work being done here at the lab". In addition, these bogus messages use up email quota and must be removed by the receiver.
Authorization
After considering advice from yourselves and the rest of the CSWG, the CSExec hereby grants approval for you to drop virus laden email transitting the email gateway. This action may commence one business day after a general announcement of the change to the lab population (FermiToday is an appropriate channel). Note, this is explicitly NOT an authorization for categorically blocking attachments by extension or mimetype. That would have to be authorized under separate authorization or service protection measures.
Because of the potential for false positives and loss of email without notice, we consider this to be an undesireable solution for the long term. We hold to the general policy that "the mail must go through" and that we will make every attempt to deliver mail. With that in mind, I ask that you continue your investigations to see if you can have the virus detection software tag mail in a manner similar to the SPAM tagging and allow some opportunity for the user to catch potential collateral damage with virus infected mail. Such a system would have to have the characteristic that a queue of tagged, stripped email would be self-purging and not block legitimate mail from the user or the server due, for example, to filling up quota.
I ask for a status on these investigations and a summary of the volume of mail dropped as virus laden over the interval at the next CSWG meeting.
Dane Skow
CSExec (deputy)
As requested by the CSEXEC the Email Administrators will investigate the implementation of a tagging mechanism similar to the SPAM tagging system. We have also implemented a method for tracking all messages that are deleted.
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