RE: ghostly mail ports

[Brian Bruns <bruns () 2mbit com>]

At 08:30 AM 1/10/03 -0800, David Gillett wrote:
>  The first generation of such packages weren't good at hiding
> they were doing, or at explaining it to users -- and as a result,
> a lot of mid-range users were stumbling across weird-looking
> email configurations and "fixing" them, not realizing they were
> actually breaking the antivirus protection they had installed.
>  The newer generation of products seem to have simply gotten
> much better at hiding themselves.  But if they hid themselves 
> perfectly, they couldn't work at all....


That used to confuse the living crap out of tech support reps too.  Of
course, when the proxies crashed, it made it look like the ISPs mail
servers were down.  Having the customer change their server names from
127.0.0.1 or localhost to the correct values always fixed it.

Newer versions snag the connection transparently from the network stack
IIRC, avoiding the mess of changing the server name, etc.  Of course, if it
crashes, you still have the same problem....

I've never had a problem with viruses - I use eudora, and NAV will just
snag the virus as soon as my mail program puts it on the drive.  
--------------------------------
Brian Bruns
Founder, The Summit Open Source Development Group
Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources
http://www.2mbit.com
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