On Sat, Mar 27, 2004 at 12:26:10AM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote: > Pigeon <jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk> writes: > > > My godfather's OE claims that messages with attached signatures are > > "unsafe", and blocks access to them entirely. It won't even let him > > read the text of the message. > > Why do I see a Linux candidate? KDE is way more than up to the task > for casual Windows users. Two problems seem to be relevant: 1) It has to be said that OE is "dialup-friendly". It only takes one click to dial up, send outgoing mail, receive incoming mail, and hang up again, all automatically, thus reducing time spent online, and the associated costs, to the absolute minimum. Last time I looked, there was no equivalent in kmail. Of course it would be possible to knock up a script to do it, but there seems to be nothing built-in. It does seem to be the case that Linux tends to assume you have an unmetered, always-on connection, whereas Windoze generally assumes you have a dialup. 2) (probably the greater) "Getting People To Try Something New", especially when they aren't really interested in computers per se. People tend to be happier to live with / work around / ignore the deficiencies of windoze than to go to all the trouble of learning a new system. My godfather used to work in IBM sales, but it was "just a job" rather than something he did out of interest, and he's not particularly into what goes on under the hood. Indeed, it's probably less than a year since he moved up from his 486... I could try giving him a Knoppix CD, but I somehow doubt he'd do anything with it. > > And today I received a bounce from someone's misconfigured Windoze > > system that they'd apparently been receiving debian-user mail on; > > Norton Antivirus had rejected one of my posts to the list because it > > had an "unsafe attachment", ie. the PGP signature. > > Didn't Symantec even market an OpenPGP product for a while? That vaguely rings a bell, but I couldn't say for sure. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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