Re: email worm outbreak

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

The easiest solution is to have an ISP who offers virus filtering.  They
keep up to date virus tables and then retain any infected messages.  You can
safely log in an view the message over the web with no chance of infection.
If they use heuristic rules as well they will retain all possibly dangerous
attachments.  Combined with spam filtering such a deal makes E-mail much
more pleasurable.  The main drawback is that you must occasionally go and
look at the list of retained messages and decide which are legitimate.  So
far I have been sent a fair number of infected messages and they have all
been retained by the ISP.  And yes, I have to occasionally let through a few
legitimate messages.  However I can do this at my leisure without having to
look at anything more than the subject and sender info.  Meanwhile the spam
is not cluttering my inbox.

And yes, people who use minority OS/mail programs have much less trouble.
The ultimate solution to the problem would be to have many (thousands?) of
very different OS/mail systems.  This is analogous to the biological
advantage of genetic diversity.  However, the perceived advantage of
monoculture seems to outweigh the disadvantages of diversity in the computer
world.  If MAC/OS or Linux were more popular than Windows they would be the
prime targets.  I have heard that many viruses no longer strike Win 95 as
much because they have been designed to target later versions.  At one time
viruses were tailored to strike VMS, but I suspect that OS is now completely
safe.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> So this is with what IBM/outlook, etc. people contend.
>
> bc  who has finally experienced a whatever.
>
> p.s. Panzers to John
>
> John S. Denker wrote:
>
> > On 08/20/2003 08:28 PM, Bernard Cleyet wrote:
> > > I've just been bombarded w/ ~ 15 "spams" w/ attachments.
> >
> > So few? You're lucky.