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Back in the days when a virus you received was from the person sending you the message, having your mail server anti virus gateway software auto notify the sender was useful. Today, it's not. I'm sure everyone has received messages like the following: Our virus detector has just been triggered by a message you sent:- To: mailbag@infogoal.com Subject: Re: Here Date: Sat Mar 13 09:18:51 2004 Any infected parts of the message (yours.pif) have not been delivered. This message is simply to warn you that your computer system may have a virus present and should be checked. Viruses today typically forge the "from" address. What that means is my address, picked at random from a machine that is truly infected, is made to be the address the mail is from. Now, any replies back from an automated system or from an individual that receives the message, goes to me and not the person that is infected. Obviously, it's useless to notify me that someone else is infected and not only is it useless, but it causes double the email traffic for, what is in the first place, a complete waste of an email. A virus email is sent (a waste of an email message) and then an auto-response from an anti-virus scanner sends a notification back to the wrong individual (another waste of an email message). Articles in trade magazines such as Stop Anti-Virus Gateway Responses help bring this problem to the attention of the masses, but obviously, it's not working well. I still receive, on almost a daily basis (and very often numerous times through the day when there's a new virus outbreak), these useless auto-notification messages. I've even started to contact the companies that are replying back to me with a form letter indicating the uselessness of their automated responses and the additional burden on their mail servers and those throughout the Internet. Hopefully, at least some of the admins receiving these messages will understand the need to disable this notification and we can all have a little more time in our lives to spend on something other then deleting of spam and useless anti-virus notifications. |