Re: POP3

[Eric Wieling <ewieling @ hephaestus . icorp . net>]

Some time ago Barnett, Howard said:

> Our LAN manager reciently changed the firewall to disallow pop3 service
> to an from the internet.  I can understand that to stop service for
> clients attempting to make a link from the internet, but I have a hard
> time understanding what eliminating POP3 requests from the local net to
> the internet will do to beef up  security.  Could someone enlighten me
> please.

I'll bet that they also monitor all inbound and outbound e-mail,
right?  Do they also disable outbound SMTP traffic?

By disableing both inbound and outbound POP3/SMTP access the company
basically keeps it's employees from sending e-mail via "unapproved"
channels.

This could be for several reasons.  Two that come to mind is that
they are afraid that their employees will send out company secrets
via a personal acocunt at an ISP.  The second one that comes to mind
is to prevent their employees from sending and receiving personal e-mail
to/from their personal account at an ISP on company time.

In both cases, I think the company should either start trusting the
employees they have or replace them with employees that they can
trust.

They could also be moving from the "permit everything and deny few
things" to the "deny everything and permit few things".  I personally
prefer the second approach.

Perhaps they were broken into recently?

Of course, I could be way off base. 8-)

--Eric
-- 
Eric Wieling
Advanced Network Research
InterCommerce Corporation
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The world needs no help seeing a fool for what they are.