Lately, I received emails such as
"I received a lot viruses from the lyx users list, and now my
windows partition is ruined."
I am truly sorry to hear this, but:
--- The virus _never_ originates from my server (the server is a Linux
server, and there are no other users but lyx (me)). The path of a
virus is either:
-- virus is directly sent to the list
-- virus is sent to one of the subscribers, and then sends itself to
every address in the subscriber's addressbook. Since the lyx list
is in the addressbook, the list receives the virus.
--- If you want virus prevention via filters, you may want to
implement it on your end. It is much less riskier than
implementing it on my end. Indeed, I do not know of any filters
that would not do false positives.
If you implement it, make sure the message containing a virus is not
bounced back to sender but simply discarded.
--- I certainly want to make list participation as pleasant as possible
but I feel no responsibility of any kind if "your hard drive is
ruined". Indeed, I do not see why it is my responsibility to
protect you from viruses; I am not your ISP.
Viruses are just one of our problems: spam is the other. I can safely
say that the only way to tackle both if we implement one of the two
methods I described in my previous email. So we have to make the usual
choice between security and convenience.
Mate
