On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 02:56:04PM +0100, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > Sometimes I get the impression that some economic actors hate mail > because it can't be fenced-off as easily as the "social" silos and > are doing their best to kill it.
That may be true, but it's not the reasoning behind the changes at my site. The primary driving force behind the changes I've been experiencing is a desire to protect the institute/enterprise from cyberattacks -- in particular, ones like these: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/cybersecurity/the-5-most-significant-cyberattacks-in-healthcare-for-2020.html (I can send URLs out -- I just can't see them when they come back in. Not even my own.) As near as I can determine, the short term goal that our IT department is striving to reach is "no end user will ever receive anything through email that could compromise the network", which means no unfiltered URLs that could be clicked on, no attachments that can be executed, etc. Doesn't matter that the end user is reading email in mutt in a Linux terminal. Our IT department is all Microsoft people anyway, and I'm not sure they even understand what a terminal *is*. They've also totally blocked access to gmail.com and other large email sites, so users can't receive malware through that vector -- for those users who are still working on campus, anyway. In the long term, they're trying to get to a point where *all* Internet traffic is under their complete control and supervision. Don't be surprised if I unsubscribe from this list with this email address in the near future. I may have to.
