Soap box

<stepping onto my soap box>

If you subscribe to the Patch management list you would have received a message like the one below.

My question is why bother un-subscribing anyone who has an Out of Office (OOO) message, if the OOO is setup correctly! I understand if the OOO is setup incorrectly.

Eric says that he does this to stop Hackers. Wouldn’t a better approach be to inform people of the dangers of having inappropriate information within their OOO instead of un-subscribing them! Why hasn’t Eric created a white paper on the subject?  Then he could send a link out to the White paper to those who have OOO with inappropriate information within them.

Once un-subscribe by an Administrator to a mailing I suspect that most people will not re-subscribe to that list due to the intimidation factor or by not realizing that they have been un-subscribed.

Which is worse Hackers’ getting information that they shouldn’t have or IT staff that are un-informed on security issues?

<stepping down from my soap box>

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Schultze

Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2005 5:34 PM
To: Patch Management Mailing List
Subject: Administrivia

We have received a lot of Out of Office messages from list members during the summer months.  Members of this list do not care where you've gone on vacation, who to call in your absence, or when you'll be back.  Hackers, on the other hand, may find this information useful.

We leave it to you - if you choose to share this information with folks that you don't trust, you may find yourself unsubscribed from the list.

Out of Office Messages:

Your account may be unsubscribed if we receive Out of Office email messages from your email address.  Out of Office (OOF) messages pose a security risk to your organization - please ensure that your OOF messages are not sent to recipients outside of your domain, or set your account to 'nomail' before using an OOF message.  Additional information on setting 'nomail' options can be found here: http://www.patchmanagement.org/faqs.asp#disable

Alternatively, filter the emails you receive from this list and place them in a separate folder so that Out of Office messages will not be sent in response

to these emails.

If you wish to receive a single email message containing all the messages contributed to the forum that day, send an email to digest- patchmanagement@patchmanagement.org. At the top of the message will be a numbered list of the subjects in that digest, followed by the complete messages themselves. Alternatively, to request a MIME digest, send an email to mimedigest-patchmanagement@patchmanagement.org.

If you only wish to receive a single email message containing all the subject lines of all the messages contributed to the forum that day, send

an email to index-patchmanagement@patchmanagement.org. If any of the messages interest you, the bottom of the index gives the email command that will retrieve the bodies of the messages.