On 28/8/2003, Bruce Whittington wrote:
>I am on another list on which every message is identified in the
>subject line automatically by the host, e.g. every message subject
>line might begin "tweeters: . . . ." Can the powers that be make this
>happen?

This is 100% useless to 'protect' you from opening worms/viruses. In
fact, it simply lulls people into a false sense of security, greatly
exacerbating the problem. Many of the worms that are running around
use genuine subject lines from genuine mail sitting in the victims
mailbox, and that tag *can and does* show up on the on the subject line
of infected messages. Meanwhile, the tags get in the way of proper
thread sorting, and you often end up having no real clue about the
message's topic, because the subject lines end up being something like :

RE: tweeters Re tweeters Re: the intended subj re: tweeters the


> On 28/8/2003, Rolan Nelson wrote:

> I love reading the messages and reports as well as being able to
> post myself, but since my computer can't tell me what's a tweeter
> e-mail from somethimg carrying a virus, I'm a little leary of


Of course your computer can tell you which messages came through the
list and which are imposters. Use the filtering features in your mail
program. Tell it filter all mail that has a header line containing:

List-Owner: <mailto:tweeters-request at u.washington.edu>

or

List-Post: <mailto:tweeters at u.washington.edu>

or

Sender: TWEETERS-owner at u.washington.edu

(any one of the three will do nicely)

into a special Tweeters folder. Voila, job done. Do this for each of
your mailing lists, almost all have List-xxxx headers now. This is the
*only* method that comes close to being reliable for telling the origin
of a list message.

But don't even rely on proper filtering for your 'safety'--get your OS
patches up to date--now, not tomorrow. Check for needed patches every
single day--use autoupdate. Turn on your firewall. Get your virus
checking software up to date. Tell it check for updates at least four
times a day. It's the people who prefer to use useless 'protections'
like subject line tags to being effective that are causing a tremendous
amount of trouble for all of the rest of us. It's not like useful
information is hard to find this week. Even MS has finally pulled one
eye out of the sand and plastered instructions on their web site.

Sorry if I'm not being polite enough, but every day I'm getting
hundreds of sobig.fs, (it outnumbers spam by a factor of ten),
hundreds of bounces from sobigs that pretend to come from one of my
addresses, and my computers are being indundated with steady attack
attempts, about two per minute each, from msblaster and nachi. My logs
are enormous, but they have to be analysed and saved anyway. I have to
pay in hard cash and a lot of wasted time for all of this nonsense.

Please, be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
--
Allyn Weaks allyn at tardigrade.net Seattle, WA Sunset zone 5
Pacific NW Native Wildlife Gardening: http://www.tardigrade.org/natives/
"The benefit of even limited monopolies is too doubtful, to be opposed
to that of their general suppression." Thomas Jefferson