From: "Craig White" <craigwhite@azapple.com>
> On Fri, 2003-01-24 at 18:09, jdow wrote:
> > From: "Guy Fraser" <guy@incentre.net>
> >
> > > Some people actualy get mail from sources outside of these lists for
work.
> >
> > There IS an advantage to gray hair. I get to play Palace Guru to the
company
> > masses. For email I strongly recommend to management that documents
should
> > be zipped and attached that way rather than sent as the actual messages.
It
> > gives better email safety since it allows you to setup a filter that
looks
> > for RTF and DOC and other formats - and corrupt the messages so they do
not
> > get displayed or worse RUN. No viruses seem to get through that.
Fetchmail->
> > Procmail=>SpamAssassin->other filters->mailbox is a powerful tool for
the
> > filtering operations.
> >
> ------
> OK - for my higher learning, I have never heard of this being done
> before. Is there a link that describes how/when this could possibly
> happen?
Which this? There were several in that message you quote. Automatically
spreading viruses is possible with html email. Many email readers preview
the email and at that time open all the attachments for proper display. If
everything is in a zip file then there is nothing that will get
automatically
opened and executed. That makes abominations like Outlook safer. The bozoid
user has to actually open the zip file and then manually execute before
there
is a danger from a virus. There's no danger during reading mail when a next
message that used to contain a virus, something not .zip encapsulated, is
previewed after it is massaged so that the html does not translate. That is
what I referred to at the end. You can easily 'destroy' mime encapsulation.
(Personally I prefer that method as it strongly encourages zip attachments
rather than inline anything. It is "theoretically possible" to take the
elements of a mimed message and repackage them into a zip, remime the
message
and place it in a mailbox. It might be worth someone's effort to do this.)
{^_^} <- An old curmudgeonette who's heard too many tails of email woe
for her tastes.
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