As an ISP with many personal and quite some major corporate and
government clients, we try desperately not to 'filter' or 'limit' our
clients access in any way. This means not limiting sizes of e-mail
attachments or length of connection (you can stay 'dialled in for as
long as you want and downlaod as much as you want - you just have to pay
for it when you get the bill) or whatever.
For the first time since the government departments asked us to filter
for the melissa virus we have instituted filtering against the hybris
worm (from hahaha@sexyfun.net) - snowhite and the seven dwarfs.
We hate doing this stuff because we handle more than an item of mail per
second through our mail servers and hence 'filtering' causes quite a
significant extra load on our systems - slowing down mail and increasing
the chance of a 'mail bombing' attack causing serious difficulties
(because our mail system has to 'read' every bit of mail - this 'worm'
does not have an obvious ntework or other incoming distinguishing
feature we can guard against in advance).
I would suggest that you ask *your* ISP to consider the same - it is
starting to really become a nuisance and we finally felt we had to take
some action.
If they wish to, they can contact postmaster@internode.com.au to ask for
any further details or to help them make up their mind whether to do
this or not. Users really can defend themselves against this
'attachment' with e-mail (unless they use MS Outlook or other mail
program that automatically opens attachments in mail), but they seem to
be difficult to educate in this regard.
Good luck, don't open attachments from an unknown source and don't eat
the yellow snow.
Eric
'68MGB MkII
Adelaide, South Australia
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