email sanitizer in operation on our email reflector

["Steve Wise" <swise@aoot.com>]

Scott noticed that sometimes the email sent to our list has scribblings on
it about being "sanitized".  This is true.  Just so everyone knows:

I've  installed a sanitizer program for our club email reflectors (some time
ago, actually).  The sanitizer processes each message posted to the
reflector and will mangle the  names and MIME types of any attachments that
are of the "executable" nature  (.exe, .com,  .vbs, etc).  These types of
attachments are used heavily to spread viruses.  The sanitizer will attach a
log telling you what it did as well.  Addionally, it mangles HTML email that
has potentially dangerous tags in it.  It does NOT remove anything though.
It just renames things in the email to help make it harmless.

This should help dampen the effects of someone posting a virus attachment to
the list. (This happened on another email list I manage).

 Note: all attachments are still included in the email, they just don't have
types and filename extensions that Windows comprehends as a file that it can
execute. If you receive an executable attachment and you KNOW it's ok, then
you can save it, rename it appropriately, then execute it.