Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of unsolicited messages to access items with desirable content value. The
architect must include planning for filtering, storing, and managing this
constant flood of e-mail.
Because e-mail transport may follow any available path, content is vul-
nerable to interception and possible modification en route to its intended
recipient. Sensitive information such as financial or personal data should
never be sent using e-mail transport without additional protections to
prevent unauthorized access or modification. Encryption and digital sig-
natures are often used to improve the security of information transferred
using the SMTP protocol and its derivatives, and the architect should
identify areas where these functions are required for business operations.
Because of its durability, the SMTP protocol is also used by some pro-
prietary technologies in order to transfer non-email information between
distributed nodes. Almost any form of data can be encapsulated and
transferred using the basic SMTP protocol, and architects should iden-
tify where these protocols are implemented in order to ensure that e-mail
and other SMTP-transport protocol management policies and firewall
settings can be maintained and updated separately.
Mailing Lists
A single e-mail message can be redirected to one or more e-mail addresses
through an e-mail mailing list application, sometimes referred to as a
“listserv” after the popular mailing list application. An e-mail sent to
allusers@somecorp.com
can easily reach all of the e-mail addresses associ-
ated with this address by relaying a copy of the message to each member
of the mailing list audience. Mailing lists are used for many purposes (see
Figure 6.6):
•
Announcements.
Mailing lists can be used for one-way communi-
cation to a large audience or other group of e-mail accounts. Typi-
cally, access rights to send to these mailing lists are restricted to a
single individual or authorized source. Announcements are trans-
mitted in a one-way fashion, with all ReplyTo responses returned to
the sender or dropped into a discard folder, depending on the mail-
ing list configuration.
