Why Do Email Admins Make Viruses Worse?

gripdamage asks: "Why are email administrators still sending virus bounce messages, when everyone knows viruses forge the sender? This effectively doubles the amount of email traffic due to the virus (triples in the case that the recipient is also notified). As one of the links says 'any AV software or admins that have it mis-configured [so] that it is continuing to send out notices...to forged senders, deserve to be ridiculed.' I have received 4 times as many erroneous bounce notifications, because of MyDoom , than the actual virus, so the bounce messages are much more of a problem! This is a problem deserving publicity, so that email admins will be shamed into doing the right thing." The problem is that most bounces are automated responses, the simple thing would be to turn them off. Of course, the rational of the automated response is to hopefully notify the infected user of the problem -- what a catch-22! What kind of policy would you recommend when it comes to spam, e-mail and automated responders?

Comments

It's not accidental, it's spam

[menscher]

The companies that are doing this know very well that the viruses forge the From: header. If they wanted to warn senders, it would be trivial to put in a check of whether this virus, which they can identify, has the "forges-the-From:-header" bit set, and not respond to those.

But this doesn't serve their purposes. Their goal, in the event of a virus outbreak, is to advertise. When people are getting viruses, they start looking for AV software, and that's the perfect advertising opportunity.

I always write back to the postmaster@domain to complain that their software is advertising, and I include a Cc: to the AV vendor, so they can see the negative publicity that results. It might help if everyone else did the same....