On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 09:43:39AM +1000, Ken Mitchelhill wrote:
> I beg to differ. At the rate viri are spreading, it is unlikely that we can
> protect ourselves exclusively through software and any assumption that we
> can all keep up to date all of the time is niave. I would strongly recommend
> removing any attachments that get sent to aus-soaring before they get
> propagated.
It needs to be a bit cleverer than that. Many mailers (i.e., the ones
which send mail as HTML) transmit /all/ email as attachments.
"Fine," you could say, "Let's just block all the attachments which aren't
plain HTML!" --- Which ignores the fact that one of the Nimda vectors
was a HTML attachment.
At the end of the day, keeping your own system free of viruses is your
own problem. You can make it vastly simpler for yourself by using a
non-Microsoft web browser and a non-Microsoft mail client (I'd recommend
Netscape and Eudora). As soon as you switch to safer, more secure
mail and web browsing software, 90% of the "risk" will disappear (remembering
that there's no such thing as an "email virus", they're actually "Outlook
viruses").
Sure, you could contact the maintainers of every mailing list you
subscribe to and ask them to block attachments, but how much effort
do you really expect other people to invest in protective measures,
and how many mailing lists should operate with degraded functionality,
to compensate for the fact that you want to run unsafe software?
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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