Comments on Email viruses

There are executable segments, it is said, in some multimedia files. As far as I can remember, that is not much, virus Nimda worked by impersonating a graphic routine.

Of course, OLK is a security nightmare: it bothered you with displyaing bitmaps while checking only the extension of the file which would be executed according to the unchecked MIME type…
But only since v1.6 has message cleaning on server been implemented in Mozilla… A very small step for them, but a giant one when you have hundreds of e-mails on dozens of mailboxes as you don't want to let them stack up and overflow as xxXxx does.

Ruxor > the only instanc I can talk about receiving an executable program was a self - defalting zip file.
And you're absolutely right.
E-mail associated viruses are quite eeasy to detect - even without the help of an anti-virus.
Some people are quite dumb, though. They think they do no longer risk anything, just like a biological virus against which you are protected once you've got it… Don't laugh, it's true (I will not give my family members' name !-p )
But there are other sorts of viruses, especially those centered on flaws found in the very OS yuo use (esp. Windows XP). To be frank, my latest PC was infected the day I installed it : I made the error of going on line to register my windows XP immedialty, with no anti-virus of anykind to protect my system. That little mongrel of a virus used my own automatic download of windows update (which is executed automatically, BTW) to infest the disk…

Hey, if every message came with a stamp http://spamstamp.org/ then you could get rich by receiving virus messages and poor by sending them -- this would be an incentive to use a secured system.