[Biojava-l] Virus in biojava email

[chris dagdigian]

Hi folks,

The best way to directly contact the people who run the various 
open-bio.org servers and systems is to email "root-l@bioperl.org" - that 
is the mailing list that all the various admin types monitor.

Regarding the specific situation: people hitting the list with viral email.

You folks are the lucky ones :) I'm the one who gets 110+ autoresponder 
replies from corporate virus scanners that find the virus and bounce 
back nasty error messages to the admin address. Each viral email sent 
out causes my inbox to be flooded with a few hundred "you've got virus 
X" replies. ack.

My preferred approach is to investigate the possibility of finding some 
sort of anti-virus scanner that will tightly integrate with our sendmail 
daemon to scan inbound and outbound SMTP traffic. If anyone has any 
suggestions to make regarding particular products or technologies 
(commercial or open source) then please email me directly or send your 
message to the root-l mailing list.

That said the people who participate on this list are the ones who 
should get to collectively decide how it is run and operated. If the 
biojava-l people can get together and decide that they want to turn off 
the "anyone can post" feature than I'd be happy to do so.

I'd counter with the following proposal however:

biojava-l becomes a "members only" list with all external mails 
quarantined by the listserver moderation software
_BUT_
several biojava-l members offer/volunteer to collectively join the 
Mailteam so that non-spam, non-viral posts of interest can get moderator 
approval in a timely fashion.

So we basically have 2 options:

(a) We investigate the possibility of anti-virus software at the SMTP 
transport layer
(b) Biojava-l goes from an open list to a moderated list with volunteers 
handling the non-member posts

Comments?

Sanyu - you can tell from this message that we are not going be able to 
fix the problem today. Go ahead and unsubscribe.

Regards.
Chris


David Huen wrote:

>We seem to have had 2 attempts to pass viruses onto this list in the last
>24 hours, both apparently originating from Indian addresses.
>
>While I'm reasonably safe (I use Pine and refuse to read HTMLised mail
>anyway), can someone in the know and has admin privileges on the list
>suggest and execute an appropriate course of action to reduce this please?
>e.g. restrict posting to list members?
>
>Regards,
>David Huen
>


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Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org>
Life Science IT & Research Computing Freelancer
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