Ancient Web: John Hardin's Email Sanitizer Fought Outlook Worms
John D. Hardin's 1998-era Email Sanitizer and 2002 scanner-tarpit HOWTO preserve the practical concerns of mail administrators protecting networks from worms and hostile scans.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
When email attachments regularly threatened to turn a whole office into a worm colony, one system administrator decided to make the mail safer before the recipient even opened it.
John D. Hardin's personal website includes photography, cats, commentary, programming, and several practical security references. Among them is the Email Sanitizer, an early mail-server filtering project whose copyright history begins in 1998. The site also retains a Scanner Tarpit HOWTO revised in December 2006, with a homepage entry for it already dated April 2002.
The Email Sanitizer was designed for people administering mail servers, not ordinary users clicking buttons in Outlook. It combined procmail and Perl to enforce policies on incoming mail: potentially dangerous attachments could be altered or quarantined, suspicious scripted HTML defanged, and risky Office macros examined.
A time capsule of threats and defenses
The Sanitizer documentation still mentions threats with period names such as MyDoom and Sobig.F, plus ZIP attachment problems and malformed mail headers. There are changelogs, local rules, development releases, patches, and mailing-list archives. The homepage explains why some users saw a message that an attachment had been renamed or rendered harmless.
Hardin says he developed it partly because people should not need money for commercial protection to avoid common email attacks. His stated reasoning combines public service with the challenge of an interesting technical puzzle.
The scanner-tarpit document presents a different defensive idea: detecting hostile network probes and intentionally slowing or confusing automated scanning. Its table of contents covers firewalls, boundary networks, Portsentry, LaBrea, and reporting through LogCheck, DShield, and MRTG. This article is about the surviving design and documentation, not a recommendation to install outdated firewall rules or filtering software.
The author's home page has strong political opinions too. Those are part of the personal-site context, but they are not necessary to understand the security resources or imply agreement with them.
What survives is a practical kind of Web publishing: a webmaster publishing tools, warnings, configuration notes, and updates in public so other administrators could learn from the same failures.
Read the Email Sanitizer project history and the Scanner Tarpit HOWTO.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #linux, #ancientweb, #webhistory, #email, #securityhistory