E-Mail Virus Fall Out

Even though there is no single major virus running around (as far as we know) at the moment, we are still seeing left over problems from the rash of viruses of a couple of weeks ago. The amount of new virus activity in the last month is just amazing. Click here to see Symantec's current list.

But the fallout can be even worse. We are getting calls from Clients that are getting e-mails bounced back to them as undeliverable for various reasons. After investigating the situation we found that their domains have been blacklisted by services that are supposed to provide ISPs with domains that are suspected of being spammers. The problem is that our Clients are not spammers. How does this happen? Well, let's say one of our virus friends gets let loose on a workstation. This workstation is on the North Pole. The owner of the workstation has 1500 names in her e-mail client (Outlook of course!). The virus picks one lucky address (mine of course) and sends itself to every other e-mail address in Outlook as well as any other e-mail addresses it can find on the workstation. These e-mails are sent from the lucky address (mine). The Blacklist Services detect this mass mailing and in order to help justify the cost of subscribing to the service, add my domain to the blacklist. Note that this message was never sent from me or from anyone in my domain. However, that doesn't matter. My domain is added. Now I send a message to my lovely wife and it gets bounced back to me saying the user doesn't exit. After looking at my wallet photos to verify that I in fact have a lovely wife I start scratching my head. There are many problems here. First, the message being sent back to me does not say I am on a blacklist. It tells me the user doesn't exist, which sends me down the wrong path to try to resolve the problem. Next, some of my messages will go out and some will not. This simply depends on whether or not the receiving e-mail host subscribes to the Blacklist Service that has me blacklisted. It's a pain in the a.... neck!

While the Blacklist Services are meant to be helpful as a deterrent to spam, they in fact can be more of a problem then they are worth. Although you can get removed from these lists, it is a pain and can take some time. In the meantime the spammers already know about the Blacklist Services and are way ahead of them. What is the solution? I wish I knew! However, some basic changes to Internet E-Mail and browsing are need to insure that these problems can not exist. Internet e-mail must be reliable and secure before it can really be used for business critical processes. Until then we will still need to use the good old telephone to call and make sure the intended recipient received our e-mail!