[wellylug] email virus scanners

[Cliff Pratt]

Mark Foster wrote:
 >
>> Feeding "delivered" email into an MTA for re-delivery is an inherently
>> risky task; email that came *to* you but did not have your name on the
>> message headers (for example, mailing lists like this) can be easily
>> bounced back to the originator by accident.
>>
>> So just make sure that you read all the warnings in the readme files :-)
>> Also consider alternatives to fetchmail like getmail; the prevalance or
>> fetchmail is based on two main factors; age and ESR's reputation.
>>
>> (Having said all that, I use fetchmail myself, so it can't be all that
>> bad!)
> 
> Indeed there was a rash of misconfigured POP3 Connectors for MS Exchange 
> (think the MS equiv of Fetchmail) which cost several businesses several 
> thousand dollars. Enough that I wrote an article about it and wound up 
> referring people to it fairly regularly:
> 
> http://www.blakjak.net/node/125
> 
> If you were to configure your linux box to behave similarly through a 
> poor fetchmail implementation, you'd likely get yourself into a lot of 
> bother. :o)
> 
> Its still a practical solution for small businesses and home 
> connections, though, as it allows you to use ISP provided services and 
> retain some level of reliability over-and-above what you can achieve at 
> home...
> 
That problem only relates to SBS, not the full MS Exchange, which 
doesn't come with a POP3 connector. There are a number of third party 
POP3 connectors for MS Exchange (full version) which may or may not 
suffer from this problem. Also that patch is more than 2 years old, so 
it's a bit much to raise it now.

Cheers,

Cliff