HTML to Text only emails...

[rac at gabrielmass.com (Richard Chonak)]

Wizard wrote:
> A company that I do work for, in an effort to protect itself from it's own
> lusers, is considering parsing emails so that any external HREFs inside the
> email point to http://localhost. They are also going to parse out all
> attachments to a central intranet location, where they will be reviewed by
> admins for legitimacy before being forwarded to the addressee. Can anyone
> see any problems with this strategy? 

Somebody needs to do a rational analysis of what this proposal costs, based, for 
starters, on the number of attachments that would be removed and reviewed.
What attachments would be rejected as not legitimate?   Just viruses and worms?
If so, then software scanning of incoming and outgoing e-mail is probably more 
economical.

What kind of service level would be intended, for the hours of the manual 
review-service and its turnaround time?   A large technical company would 
probably have people using e-mail 24 hours a day.  Manual review of all 
attachments could be a burdensome workload, and I can't imagine that working for 
long.

What's the attitude about people sending or receiving personal e-mail?   A lot 
will be blocked by a program that strips out attachments.   Will staff figure 
the company is taking a draconian approach and that they're being monitored very 
closely?

--RC