Robbie Honerkamp: > Not true. You can't get a virus from reading an email message. Not true. The Good Times virus is a hoax, but it is possible to get a virus from e-mail, in some circumstances. Some e-mail systems allow the sender to tag the contents as being plain text, HTML, C source code, a shell script, and so on. This is not something that MIME invented -- it existed well before MIME. It's a good thing, since it allows programs to handle mail more intelligently. However, stupid people can also write mail user programs that automatically run a program that comes in e-mail. Even more stupid people use such programs. For example, I've seen a procmail rule that was essentially like this: :0 * ^Subject: runme | sed '1,/^$/d' | sh For those who don't understand procmail's syntax, this takes every letter that has "runme" in the subject and runs its body as shell commands. Very, very dangerous. I've been told that some Windows mail programs have something similar built in (if you receive a Word document, they automatically run Word and load that document -- Word documents can contain powerful macros that are run automatically when the document is loaded), but I haven't verified it. GNU Emacs had a similar feature (certain magic lines in a file could run any Emacs commands automatically when the file was loaded -- and Emacs commands are powerful indeed). So it's quite possible to get a virus from e-mail, but you have to either be wantonly stupid (if you install a dangerous procmail rule), or just ignorant that the program had the capability (what do you mean you didn't read the footnote on page 481 of the technical reference manual you must buy separately?). For more information, you might want to search the RISKS archive (see the comp.risks newsgroup). > Notice that the original post came from AOL.. :) Not everyone from AOL is stupid. I've exchanged mail with an AOL user who wrote C compilers to cure hangovers... Most AOL users are new on the net, and they're clumsy, silly and sometimes irritating, but there's some very shrewd people on AOL as well. With six million users (three times as many as on the whole of Usenet when I started reading it) you get all kinds of people. -- Rural sizes win <liw@iki.fi> <http://www.iki.fi/liw/> Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.
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