Re: [Asrg] System hijacking

At 3:10 PM -0500 6/26/03, gep2@terabites.com wrote:
>The great majority of senders would not need attachment permission

6% of the email to wormalert contains attachments.

Virtually all of those messages were sent to everyone in the 
recipients address book.  (E.g. baby pictures, jokes...)

A number of email companies have based their entire business model on 
the fact that their user's email messages *always* include 
attachments.

Based on those, I would guess that no major software company will 
support a proposal which blocks attachments by default.  Furthermore, 
I would expect them to fight any such proposal quite vigorously.  And 
even if they fail, and such a system is put in place, people will 
very rapidly white list everyone of their close friends.  Thus 
negating any benefit in fighting viruses.  (The issue with executable 
attachments isn't so much that they are accepted, but that the email 
client is fooled into thinking that they aren't executable.  If that 
bug isn't fixed, then obviously the ability to do selective blocking 
won't be there either.  Blocking at the server sounds tempting, but 
unfortunately it means trying to guess what nutty attachment syntax 
Outlook might actually recognize, as opposed to what the standards 
said they should accept.)
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Anti-Spam Service for your POP Account
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.

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