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accessing email w/o internet access

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by fisheye121

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Ok, this one's a little strange but my supervisor wants it done so here it goes... My supervisor wants the employees of a group home we run to have access to their email without being able to surf the web. The obviously would have internet access to download their emails, he just doesn't want them to be able to open up a browser and surf all day. I figured I could just remove every occurance of internet explorer so that they wouldn't have a browser to open, they would access their email through outlook or express...but what would happen if they recieved an email from, say, staples.com with links to the site? What would happen if they clicked those links? Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks!

11 replies

by lrund

On the windows side of the equation you have real problem trying to remove IE from the windows operating system. The product is built into the OS and is integrated so that you must have IE in order to access mail. In fact outlook and express will not function without IE. I know there are executables that will remove and disconnect the IE from the OS, but it leaves you with a worthless system unless you reinstall IE again.
There only one option that I can think of; use Unix with text based only email and really clamp down on the access of the employees.

by sbaltus

It can be done it depends on what os you are using
we have done this for one of our clients they are useing windows sbs2000 with ISA server you can create rules in ISA server to take care of this

by joseph moore

Set up a proxy server for the users to go through to go out to the Internet. In the proxy setup, only allow TCP port 25 & 110 to have outbound access. Block all other ports for outbound access.
Port 25 is the SMTP port, for sending outbound e-mail.
Port 110 is POP3 port, for receiving inbound e-mail.

If the users use Windows machines, there is built-in browsing ability in Windows Explorer (the file-browsing tool), so it is really hard to remove all programs on a Windows box that can surf the web.
The best solution is to just block outbound access on all ports except for e-mail.

One last thing, you can't just block TCP port 80 for outbound access. 80 is the default HTTP port, that most web surfing uses. A smart person could configure their web browser (IE or Netscape) to use an anonymous proxy server, located out in the Internet somewhere, that runs on another port (8080 is the usual proxy port, but you can find proxies that run on other oddball ports). So, if you only block port 80 for outbound access, and a user configures a system to use a proxy server on port 8080, then that user's copy of IE would go out on port 8080, hit the proxy server, and then go out normal. They would then be able to surf any web site they want, bypassing your filters! So, keep that in mind.

hope this helps

by grizwald54

I have a client who has a situation similar to this. While the solution only works on 9x clients, it's a workaround. Search your computer for a file called iexplore.exe - this is the executable file that runs Internet Explorer. Rename this file something that you will remember - we named it old.old. This simply won't allow IE to start up. If you are using NT/2000/XP, this will not work. Also, if you have smart users, they may figure out that they can simply open Windows Explorer and type in a URL which will let them browse. But in my case, the end users at this client aren't smart enough to figure that out!

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