Re: Return Receipts

>  From:    dshaw@spartan.com (Shaw, David)
>  
>  Please forgive my obtuseness, but what exactly is the issue?
>  
>  Dave Shaw
>  Spartan International, Inc.
>  Spartanburg, SC

We sign up for these ****_L & may be subscribing to several of them ... I am 
on some for AS/400 related & some hobby topics, and I am also on some forums 
that trigger e-mail to me when there is a posting by someone else in a topic 
of interest to me.

Some people have e-mail systems where they will be out of the office for some 
time period & want to let their business callers know who to reach at their 
offices in their place & how long they plan to be gone, so they do some 
settings on their e-mail similarly to answer machine on voice mail.

Some of them can be coded to only send the reply to the first of a series of 
e-mails from anyone with the same e-mail address.

They neglect to do an exclusion for input from ****_L so we have these bouts 
of "so & so is out of the office messages" for every message we post to some 
****_L

First level of annoyance is when one of these messages goes to the person who 
posted something to ****.L

Next level is when there are several of them

Next level is when new ****.L participants are getting them for the first 
time & asking what can we do to prevent them (nothing other than ask the 
problem person to get better software or better understanding in how to avoid 
this on their next trip, but as more & more offices get this kind of software 
it will be a growing problem like that of spam, hackers, virus scams etc.)

Next level is when they are going to everyone on the ****.L

Next level is when the posting to ****.L about whoever is out of the office, 
arrives at whoever's system & triggers another of these, eventually making 
use of ****.L unusable to anyone, like happened on BPCS_L about a week ago.

Depending on degree of other irritants, we can sometimes make too much of a 
fuss over various problems ... at the moment I think the most critical stuff 
we should be looking at is

a) Do we have any internet exposures from PCs connected to our networks ... 
check it out with 
http://grc.com/default.htm
click on Shields Up & do both kinds of tests

b) What other kinds of security exposures do we have ... subscribe to one of 
the e-info-security newsletters ... I am getting one from ITAA 

c) Then as we check out these exposures on our sites ... ask for help places 
like here

I used to get 100 spam a day, but I have cut that down significantly ... 
there's things we can do to fight all kinds of internet irritants ... the 
return receipts one is relatively new for many of us so we have not yet 
figured out how to deal with them.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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