cogdogblog

SoBIG is My Deletion Task

Anti-Virus detection systems are removing viral email attachments, but they waste my time and clog the net with un-needed traffic by bouncing messages back to people who did not actually send them.

So far, about every 8 hours, I have to delete 60-100 Anti-Virus detection messages from my inBox. I waste more time writing filters to catch them (then forget to take the updated filters to my home machine).

I may be naive, but since likely 99% of the stuff neing caught with virus-infected atttachments are spoofed emails (not actually sent by the sender, but forged by the virus program), what the hell is the use of sending an email back to the spoofed sender letting them know a message they did not send had a virus? It borders on abuse. Wake up Symantec and others.

This is confusing a lot of people in our system, and the helpdesks are answering lots of questions why Norton and SimFlex and AnitGen are writing them saying they are sending infected messages.

Is there really data that says a significant number of actually personally composed email messages (ones actually sent by a human sender) are infected?

The Anti-Virus systems could do the interent a favor by just sending these messages to dev-null, to the trash, the black hole where socks are stored. Stop emailing letting me know that messages I did not send has gunk in it. Stop wasting my time makiong me delete, delete, delete, delete. Stop clogging ther net with more bandwidth. Stop. Stop. St-----

Update
Someone beat me to it and slashdot-ted this idea. Please re-blog and circulate unitl someone at Symantic, et al gets a freaking clue.