In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Several main risks come to mind:
1) The vast majority of virus' are spread by attachments, if they don't go
through your server you're relying on their other guy's mail server AV
scanning, or that of your host computers, not a good bet in my book.
2) Same story for a series of really nasty exploits that pretend to be
screensavers, free software, etc. Once one of your hosts is compromised
it only gets worse from there.
3) It would be difficult to enforce company policy about things like
personal mail, and inappropriate attatchments (porn for example)
4) It will increase support costs, because any time someone has trouble
with it, you'll have to figure out what they're using first before you can
fix it. Our company has some old AOL accounts left over from before I got
here, and you have no idea how much of a pain they are when AOL has
problems.
5) Your customers might end up getting mail that looks like
[EMAIL PROTECTED] instead of [EMAIL PROTECTED] once people get used to
it, very unprofessional.
6) When people are on vacation or are fired, no one will be able to access
their mail account this could mean loss of company commincations,
overflowing inboxes, or stale mail (stuff thats been in there way too long
without being read).
Personally I'd turn it around and ask them what it is that they could
do with those kinds of mailboxes that they can't currently do with the
mail server. If they don't have a good answer (and I can't think of one)
then deny it on security grounds.
If a number of people are asking for this perhaps you should do a user
survey and see if there is some feature that you're not providing that
would make the users happy.
Chris Berry
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems Administrator
JM Associates
"Ask me for the impossible and I'll do it immediately, miracles take a
little longer."
