[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Spyware / Adware



Incoming from Daniel Pittman:
> 
> *Most* mail clients under Unix are better written than to do that, but

Even mutt (a terrific MUA) _can be told_ to automatically "handle"
MIME types for you, if you want.  It just depends what's in your
~/.mailcap, and that can contain any sort of command you can imagine.

If you want it to mangle your user data when it runs across a
malicious png, it can do that.  That doesn't mean it has to.  It only
means you have that option.  There's nothing inherently wrong with an
MUA being able to do this.

The difference is, an MUA in Unix/Linux doing that can affect user
space.  In other (so called) OS's, it likely can affect privileged
areas of the system, which is probably not a good thing.

See "auto_view" in the mutt manual.


-- 
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*)               http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling 
- -



Reply to: