--On Friday, February 04, 2005 8:41 AM +0000 Tim Chown wrote:Our anti-virus system tags all IETF draft announcements as being potentially dangerous. I suspect because of the unusual options to fetch the data that are encoded in the MIME header.
Hmm. There is a case to be made that those external body part options are as safe, or safer, than a delivered attachment: you can, in principle, inspect either before opening or executing it, but I can easily imagine one of those "a good/fun user experience is more important than security or bullet-proof-ness" MUAs being designed to provide better access for an actual virus-checker for the external body parts. Certainly an external body part is as safe and probably safer than an imbedded URL, especially in an MUA that opens those URLs automatically.
So my instinctive response to that request is "have you considered getting your anti-virus software fixed?".
Our firewall software here also briefly tagged message/external-body attachments as dangerous. Instead of just removing the attachment, the software deleted the entire message and sent a note saying that they had done so. Whoever had installed the software just didn't get it; it took us a bit to get them to fix it.
Even more fearful, I have a feeling that they were just following instructions provided by the firewall software people, who SHOULD know better.
Tony Hansen
_______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf