Re: warning -- email virus attack.

[David W. Tamkin]

Ron Guilmette wrote,

G> What I was thinking was something more along the lines of an MTA-inbuilt
G> thingy that would strip out any and all *executable* attachments, while
G> leaving everything else intact.

Russ Allbery responded,

A> One of the main difficulties of taking this approach is that for viruses
A> and the like you have to consider any Word or Excel attachment to be an
A> executable in the presence of macro viruses.

A month or two ago a virus turned up (I think it was Babylon95?) that infects
.hlp files.  Ever since then McAfee has recommended scanning all files, not
just those named with the traditional extensions for executable code.  So
pretty much we'd be talking about removing all attachments.