Re: "scanning" e-mail [WAS: 3 Free Gmail invites]

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 10:34:31 EDT, Patrick W Gilmore said:

> Bringing this back on topic, IFF that can be extended to e-mail (and my 
> understanding is that it can), the disclaimer is worthless - at least 
> the part about having to delete it.

I often send the miscreants a pointer to Peter Guttmann's work on securely
erasing magnetic media, and ask if they're willing to pay for the downtime of
tracking down which blocks on the multiple terabytes of RAID-5 on our main mail
hub need to be wiped out (remember - the block could have been allocated and
then freed, so it gets interesting).  Oh.. and would they care to pay for new
backup tapes, because we'll have to restore them to a scratch area, erase the
offending files, then make new tapes and destroy the old ones and wipe the temp
disks..  Oh.. and second-order costs for people idled while we do the work... ;)

I mean, if they're so worried that their screw-up will earn them an Ollie North:

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/reagan/chron.txt

they should pay for the clean-up, right? :)

(And yes - I am *fully* aware that we don't take a second of downtime if we
lose a disk on a hot-swap RAID-5, as it auto-hot-swaps and rebuilds onto a
spare and then asks for help.. recovering from one failing drive in a raidset
is *not* symmetric with intentionally trying to nuke possibly-moving data off
all the volumes concerned.. ;)

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