Cisco/IronPort Encryption using square brackets

[Jason Meyer]

Came across an interesting problem, apparently our mainframe cannot 'easily' produce a square bracket charachter.  Something to do with EBCDIC versus ASCII and that the characters [ or ] are not part of the EBCDIC language.

I did find where possibly a hex code of x'AD' and x'BD' may work for [ and ] respectifully.  But our mainframe programmers have resisted this, meaning that I need to create a new filter for e-mails generated by our mainframe, which I could do.. 

Just wondering if anyone else has run into this issue and if the default should be changed to something more legacy, I mean friendly to EBCDIC? 

[Andreas Mueller]

Hi Jason,

just a personal opinion about this, I think the square brackets for ecryption tagging in Subjects were used because we already tag messages that have been flagged virus or spam positive by prepending a warning in square brackets. So it seems logical to use this syntax in encryption as well.

As for your case, maybe the mainframe programmers can add an x-header instead a modified subject as well? That way nothing of the visible parts of the message need to be changed, a filter still is nesseary of course.

Regards,

Andreas