Re: HTML Emails and Firewall Security

["Victoria of Borg" <vicofborg () myrealbox com>]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Ron Suarez wrote:

> I'm curious how many of you also see this as a threat to your network and
> also filter out html emails?

Heck yeah!  And I'm not even running Outlook/Exchange.  I have a Novell
GroupWise 5.5 (soon to be 6.5) environment at the moment, and HTML e-mails
are currently rendered in the Local Machine zone.  Evil, evil stuff.  If I
could get away with banning all HTML e-mail I'd do it.  But I can't.
Novell is lucky that a worm hasn't been developed to exploit this little
bug.

GroupWise versions 5.5 and 6.0 both view the HTML-part of a message if it
has a choice between a plain-text and html component.  GW6.5 apparently
has a way to set it to view the plain-text part, which is what I'll be
doing once we get it.  I haven't played with the new stuff long enough to
know what zone the HTML content is rendered in.

> I am also seeing more and more B2B marketing departments send html email
> (eNewsletters) as part of their strategy. I'm thinking that their emails
> aren't being received properly by their clients or received at all.

Like me.  I have a rule that shunts all internet-originated e-mail with
html-tags in it to a special folder.  If I decide to read it, I'll View
the attachment-list and read the mail-source if I have to.  And if I can't
see any content around all the HTML gark, I just don't read it.  Some
newsletters do include a plain-text component which I'll read, but that is
becoming more and more rare.


The "Jen" of Generation "Z".  Your children will be assimilated.
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