I hope that his IT people did a little bit better of a job than your HS admins did. Otherwise the least thing they have to worry about is yahoo mail

 

Strike:

1) I'm not
2, 3, 4) Agreed
5) My point arguing your point on Tom's point about reasons other than virus protection was to make the point that anyone with enough computer skills to set up a proxy at home and so forth probably would not be so foolish as to download naked-annak.jpg.com onto their computer and double click on it. Point taken?

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by SpEeDxXxRaCeR
[B]Don't worry they only filter the url address, which i'm sure off.

 

We can't ping through our firewall so I can't take the IP address route. But here's how I used to beat the proxy for mail.yahoo.com.

- See the new mail icon from my.yahoo.com, then click on it.
- Get the standard "You're a bad employee page. We're calling your CIO right now"
- URL is still showing - something like: http://mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=my&.intl=us
- Insert one of the mail servers between "mail." and "yahoo". They used to be low numbers between 1 and 14 (of the ones I used) so I'd end up with a URL of something like: http://mail.f10.yahoo.com/?.refer=my&.intl=us then hit enter.
- The filtering software would not be programmed for all the mail servers and would thus let the request past.

* Note: I have not used this method in a year or so and it will be dependent on the filtering software being used.

* Note to the Note: I just looked and it looks like yahoo mail servers added zero's to their fleet of mail servers so that they'd be numbered 110, 120, 130, 140, etc. I just saw numbers 130 and 140.


You might also be able to get the Akamai trick to work where you find an Akamai address then delete out the URL and add the one you want. As of a few months ago I saw this working on non-mail sites.

 

Thanks Greg. Your method will work fine for now.

As to the other responses, I'd like to say that you are yet another reason why I like this board so much. For the most part the responses were well thought out and informative, and have given me pause to my idea of getting around the filters.

I am not an IT guy, I am a MIS guy. My degree is from a business school not an engineering school. I am half an IT guy and half a Accounting/Business guy. I say this because I think that IT's view may be somewhat myopic. I don't see the blocking of web-based e-mail sites as a purely virus protection issue, I think it is equally if not more so a privacy in the workplace issue. I'd be surprised if this company's motivation to block web-based e-mail sites came from the IT department and not the legal/management department.

A few years ago all very large companies monitor their employees e-mail. Either, looking for keywords or actually having staff that does the monitoring. This is done for a variety of reasons, some legitimate some not so legitimate. Web-based e-mail arose for the most part to meet a demand of the working community to provide a private means of communication. I don't like the idea of some 20 year old intern reading my e-mail. So I choose to use web-based e-mail to maintain my privacy. For the same reason I do not use the company's phone system for really personal phone calls, I use my cell phone.

So yes, it may put my status with the company in jeopardy. However; I will continue to use web-based e-mail to communicate with head-hunters. I trust my ability to know enough to not open a virus a lot more than I trust that some high up manager won't someday decide that the company needs to tighten its belt and lay me off anyway. At least when that happens I'll know where to turn to for my next job.

-- Tom

BTW - don't get me started on my views of outsourcing IT functions such as e-mail.