[Haifux] Is the risk real? (Was: New mail icon for Thunderbird over Gnome)

[Eli Billauer]

Hi, Since my not-so-updated software versions became an issue in itself (somehow I always get that) I wondered: Leave alone the unpleasant feeling of knowing your computer *could* be exploited, are there any real cases of attacks against personal, non-server Linux machines? The need to protect a server or a shared machine is obvious. But when it comes to a personal computer, is there any real life justification to be anything else than completely indifferent to those risks? Or can we in fact take a kibbutz approach of leaving the door open, knowing that we may invite someone to break in, but that doesn't really happen? This is not a question about what can happen, but what really does. And just to wrap up the original subject: I was reluctant to try mail-notification, because my mail filters move around the mails as they arrive. So I suspected things would get messy using a tool that apparently polls the mail box files directly. Anyhow, my solution ended up to be the Gnome Integration add on. I also installed Mail Tweak, which among others allowed me to set HTML + Plain text as the default outgoing mail format.    Eli On 05/13/2012 08:40 PM, Oron Peled wrote: On Sunday, 13 בMay 2012 19:22:20 Eli Billauer wrote: Hello all, I've finally started working with Thunderbird under Linux (FC12, with Thunderbird 3.0.7). The old settings were migrated perfectly, If your "new" one is 3.0.7, I am afraid to ask what was the old ;-) $ rpm -q thunderbird thunderbird-11.0.1-1.fc15.i686 As you can see I use a pretty old Fedora (F15, plan to upgrade directly to F17, before F15 is EOL). Still, using a network-facing application which did not get any security updates for several years, is... (ok, let's call it brave, not to be offensive...) and all is working fine. Well, there's a thing I miss. In Windows, there used to be an icon when new mail has arrived. This icon doesn't show up on Linux. Obviously in Linux its a separate application (which is hopefully slimmer, since it runs all the time). IIRC, Gnome used to have a nice applet called "mail-notification": http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify This supported multiple accounts/mailboxes/protocols, etc. I believe you can find it pre-packaged even for your pre-historic Fedora. Cheers, -- Web: http://www.billauer.co.il

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