chrisp

Okay I have been in the computer industry for many years and I still cant get me head round why ISP's dont block known viruses. Surely is not a huge overhead to virus check email coming in and out ?

Suppose the downside would be speed, but surely you could opt to have you mailbox virus checked or not or just attachments etc. Okay it wont stop new viruses but surely it would stop the same ones been sent after a solution has been found.

Am I missing something ?

cheers

chris

IanW

Some ISP's do scan the e-mails.

I use Titanhosts http://www.titanhosts.net for a domain name i host and all the mails frmo there are scanned, why more ISP's dont do this i dont know, but its a nice little extra that i get from them.

Ian

ChrisB

Indeed, for the domains we host for customers all e-mails and attachments are run through VirusScan during processing. The number of people with infection is quite worrying at times.

Some ISPs and companies use http://www.messagelabs.com/ for scanning. I think http://www.star.net.uk/ use it.

boomer

There may be legal issues here!!

Sure, you would probably be very happy if, say, consij, cunsig, consigne - er, the Post Office offered to check your mail for the Anthrax virus, but where would it stop? Oh, we're just checking that there wasn't any Manchester United references in your mail, oh, i noticed that your bank account is seriously overdrawn etc.

It is bad enough for the government to be passing laws allowing snooping, but if ISPs had such powers, things could easily get out of hand!

mb

p.s. ASPs are a different kettle of fish though!

JackClark

Who says they can't look at your mail now?

NotoriousREV

ISP's can scan e-mails for virus's but it costs us money in licences, so it's usually offered as an add on service. As for overhead, actually it would add a lot of strain depending on how many mails are handled per day. I have three mail servers all running either 2 or 4 CPU's and several Gb of RAM that work hard as it is. You want it, you pay for it.

I'll bet you didn't know that most ISP's filter for spam already? We stop 60,000 spam mails per week, and users still complain that they get too much. If we tighten up the rules, it becomes censorship.

And yes, your ISP can read your mail, but they probaly don't without permission. Any of my staff caught reading customers e-mail without good reason would be handed their p45 as we have confidentiality contracts in place.

JackClark

We can scan up to 120,000 mails per hour from once appliance, stack them up if you need to scan more. You can either manage these boxes yourself or we'll do it for you from our NOC. Will also scan HTTP, FTP and POP3 if you need it.

DrEvil

JackClark - ever thought about a banner add?

dsmith

Its a fine line. Where do you start. Can you imagine the moaning and disucssion on here and newsgroups of say BT Openworld unilaterally banned .exe attachements from any of its mail. Whilst most would understand the reasons and impact (and the ways around it e.g. zipping etc.) many many people wouldn't and would see it as another example of Big Brother (look at the reaction to caching which 99.5% of the time is a postive benefit to users) The cost to a very large ISP in hardware,virus updates and mostly support calls from the uninformed would probably be huge.

Even in a semi-controlled closed user group such as the Network I work on, it has taken the recent code-red and other worms to cause people to see that is in everyones interest to control viruses. To far too many people though its another intrusion by the ISP.

Deano

dsmith

The service small ISPs can offer customers to differentiate themselves from the NTLs, BT etc of this world are varied and Virus Scanning is a good example. At the endof the day Technical Users will find an ISP that offers the services they want at a price they're happy with. Please dont confuse the general public with technical users

Deano

NotoriousREV

"Please dont confuse the general public with technical users"

Yeah, the general public are the customers I talk to every day, the technical users are the ones I never hear from

JackClark

Yes Dr

mutant_matt

Ian/Lee, [shamless plug] Hooray for Titanhosts - everybody on this BBS should support/use/host with them [/shamless plug]

Matt

P.S. And pay for Lee's bandwidth increases (which in no way are used as a benefit for our UT sessions )

JackClark

http://www.fasthosts.com/virus.html They use a bloody good scanner as well

dsmith

There's always http://www.ignite.com/internetservic...irusscreen.htm for businesses (flame suit on ).

JackClark

Or http://www.mcafeeasap.com/content/vi...ap/default.asp

Funnily enough also called VirusScreen