Bloody Outlook Express viruses!

[baratron]

I have one particular email address that is very prone to receiving virus mail. Don't know why that one in particular. Yesterday, I decided I was sick of going through deleting virus-infested messages by hand, and set up a mail filter in pine to drop everything sent to that address into a separate folder.

Today, I opened my "Potentially Spam" folder to discover that I had received 717 virus emails in 22 hours. 708 of them from the same person. Erk. 708 x 40k makes... 28MB? Yikes!

I wonder if I can tell my ISP to bounce back everything sent from that address? I'm sure I can set up the local machine to drop it all in /dev/null, but maybe if the idiot whose Outlook Express is sending this stuff out got 700 bounce messages a day, she might clean up her machine.

Oh, hang on - I'm crediting lusers with common sense *sigh*.

Comments

[dougs.livejournal.com]

You may make more progress talking to her ISP.

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Probably a stupid question, but have you tried emailing her directly? I know some people get quite stubborn, and refuse to believe that they're sending out viruses, but I'd certainly want to know if I was doing it...

As for bounces, some kind of automated "this message has been rejected because it contains virus X" message would probably work better than "this has been rejected because I don't like your address".

[lovingboth]

Personally, I'd lose the email address.

This is the advantage of having control over your own mail server - you can tell it to do what you're talking about...

[jaxom.livejournal.com]

You might want to try http://spamassassin.taint.org/ It's managed to allow me to reclaim one of my old addresses from the virii and spam merchants. 30 odd spam a day, now down to about 1 every couple of days gets through, and put a simple HTML tag filter on it catches the remainder. I autowhitelist anyone in my address book and my mailing lists, so they don't get caught by accident.