List Attachments? (Was: RE: VIRUS ON THIS LIST) (fwd)

[David Sowder]

On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Aikens, Curtis wrote:
>Viruses are just a part of life in our industry.
>
>I wouldn't go so far as to blanket restrict attachments to the list for
>this.
>
>Instead I offer that we each have a professional responsibility to protect
>those in our care, be it with antiviral software or just common sense not to
>open unsolicited attachments (or both).

David Sowder, list owner/manager here again:

Perhaps we can use this opportunity to discuss the use of attachments on
the powerh-l@lists.swau.edu list.  I personally have been thinking about
restricting the use of attachments for several months but have not had the
time to look into it further.

o Messages are already limited to ~40KB and thus most attachments are
  likely too big.
o Attachments are, in my opinion, more efficiently distributed as a
  referenced web or ftp document on a poster maintained site, thus saving
  the diskspace of the uninterested and the bandwidth of all, most notably
  the list host network.
o A significant percentage of attachments I see are in what I would
  categorize as annoying, at least to me personally.  These would include
  a text/html copy of the message, the VCARD stuff, and most
  recently, viruses that eat Microsoft installations for lunch.

These are reasons I can think of for restricting list attachments.  I'm
going to guess from the number of attachments that are over the ~40KB
message size limit that there are not many attachments sent to the list
that make it, thus few "legitimate" attachments would be blocked by
restricting attachments sent to the list.

Note that I did see the suggestion of filtering messages for viruses on
the list distribution server, but that would only solve the problem for
this list (there are many others out there :) and may serve only to lessen
the perceived need for proper virus protection on the mail client machines
of list subscribers.

Comments?  Suggestions?

--
David R. Sowder
Network Manager/Lead Software Technician
Southwestern Adventist University
http://www2.swau.edu/~davids/         Primary Email Address:   davids@swau.edu


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