SNTT : Button to check if your users are fowarding mail to external email accounts 

Sean Cull  11 December 2008 18:28:53

Users forwarding automatically forwarding emails to external accounts can cause both security and reliability issues. I have seen instances where an email was automatically sent to an external account which sent back an error bounce message ... which got sent to the same account ... which sent back another bounce message ... and so on.

There are two main ways that users will do this.

The first is to modify the mail forwarding address in their person record ( Can your users edit this setting ? Should they be able to edit this setting ? ). You can find these affected records by searching the people view in the NAB / Domino Directory using a search string such as the one shown below - this is a cruse search looking  for the existence of the "@" symbol in the mailaddress field. Note that you can save this as a shared search for future use.



The second method that users use to forward mail to external accounts is to use the mail rules in their mail files. These can be disabled in the server configuration record but they are genuinely useful things to have in many cases.

I have written code for a button which will scan everyones mail rules ( assuming the user has access to their mail files ) and return a report of mail rules containing the symbols "@" and "." in the same forwarding address. This is a fairly crude search string but it is effective in most cases - feel free to improve upon it.

Clicking on the button will produce a report such as the one below which is emailed to your Notes account.



If you are having trouble accessing peoples mail files you may want to try using the "Full Access Administration" option in the administrator client




You can download the as an lss file at the end of this post. You can also download a database with the button in the first document - just cut and paste it to where ever. You should obviously look at the code before you click on the button - do this by selecting the button, right clicking and choosing edit. The easiest way to select the button without pressing it is to backspace onto it.

The code is provided for your own use without warranty. FoCul would be very happy to provide you with admin or development support for your Notes and Domino needs. You can contact us via

http://www.deliverytoolkit.com - our new shrink wrapped offerings
http://focul.net - our main site ( needs updating !! )
http://seancull.co.uk ( my personal tech blog )


mailaudit.zip
mailaudit2.lss

As ever if anyone knows of a better way to monitor this - or to disable it - please let me know. It does seem odd that the functionality does not exists in 80x

The last question is will my GPRS signal last far enough into the Irish Sea to replicate this from my ferry !

Sean

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