RE: AntiVirus Replies [was: VIRUS IN YOUR MAIL]

From: Dave (mudman@R181172.resnet.ucsb.edu)
Date: 10/30/01 

Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 15:09:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Dave <mudman@R181172.resnet.ucsb.edu>
To: Brandon Harper <lists-inet@booms.net>

> > it would be a good thing for somebody to be able to DoS a list by
> > sending a little virus and firing off 250 autoresponders?
> >

[snip]

> 2.) E-mail has very small performance hit. I won't really elaborate on this
> one since its rather obvious. I've worked on some RedHat boxes that weren't
> anything terribly special handling 100+ messages (both incoming and

There is a performance hit that is latent that you are not looking at.
Since most of us are computer people, we get into the habit of analyzing
efficiency issues with *computers*. But what about all the human time
spent deleting all those autoresponses?

Although it was pointed out that not *everyone* is using auto-responders,
if we assume the list was large enough that any given small percentage of
subscribers have scanners, would could presumabably get the proverbial 250
auto-responders going off. (And if you just won't believe it, we may
assume the virus sender may cc every list available on FreeBSD.org, from
freebsd-questions to hardware to security. Many of us subscribe to more
than one list, and presumably, some autoresponding machines as well)

If you are lucky enough to not being using a GUI like a Yahoo! mail
account, you can probably delete their mess pretty fast (esp in Pine).
But then we have to ask ourselves, do we just want to hold down the
delete-key for 250 seconds everytime some joker wants to drop a virus off
to a list?

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