[Osia-members] AGM and Stepping Away

[Jack Burton]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2017 15:26:25 +1100
Nick Moore <nick at mnemote.com> wrote:
> I'm on fastmail: their headers indicate that it was received with
> valid SPF and a Spam score of 0.0.Gmail can be greatly mysterious at
> times.

In general I agree, but in this case I suggest that gmail was doing the
right thing.

The message in question had an attachment of type application/gzip that
had a file name ending in ".zip" (instead of ".gz").

On platforms where magic numbers are ignored in favour of legacy
filename extensions (principally Windows & VMS), a MIME type / file
extension mismatch in a mail attachment is a common sign of a nefarious
sender.

Rather than waste cycles scanning the content of such suspect
attachments, many large scale mail systems that expect to have Windows
(or VMS) users simply reject.

After all, if it's not nefarious, it's almost always an error anyway
(as was presumably the case here).

So I don't think gmail was at fault in this case (although I've seen
plenty of others where it was).

One such bounce could easily be overlooked or mistaken for a member
who'd simply forgotten to advise of a change to his email address.

A whole bunch of them (oddly, quite a number of OSIA members use Google
for their mail hosting, so I assume the number of bounces would have
been non-trivial) on the other hand would seem pretty hard to ignore...

Personally I was *not* affected (we host our mail in-house), but I've
heard a few reports off-list today (in addition to those seen on-list)
of members who were affected.

Regards,


--
Jack Burton FACS CP <jack at saosce.com.au>
Director, Saosce Pty Ltd
Company Secretary, Safecoms Cyber Security Pty Ltd
--