[OT] Handling Returned Virus Mail

[J. Landman Gay]

Scott Rossi wrote:

> Over the last week I've been inundated (yet again) with a tidal wave of
> bounced virus email messages.  Of course I did not initiate any of the
> original messages -- I'm receiving the bounced attempts and server notices
> as a result of virus propagation.

I am routinely inundated with these. Two weeks ago I accumulated 8 megs 
of bounced mail in 24 hours. Another rarely-used mailbox gets about ten 
of these a day.

> Any suggestions on how to combat this problem?

There's no way to stop it, of course. If you have spam filter control on 
your server, you can direct them to dev/null based on the subject, 
filtering on "returned mail" and "mail returned". The down side is that 
if you really do write to someone and it bounces, you'll never know.

What I do is filter on those two strings within my email program (rather 
than on the server,) directing them to a junk folder, and then scan 
through them occasionally to make sure they aren't from anyone I 
recognize. It's a pain no matter how you deal with it though.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com