[Mailman-Users] Re: Text and virus infections (was: Per-user anonymity? nickname capability?)

[Mark Sapiro]

James Sinnamon wrote:
>
>Sorry to ask such a basic question, but ...
>
>If e-mail is restricted to text only, we can be 100% 
>(99.99999999998% ?) confident that a user will 
>never be infected with a virus?
>

Assuming you mean plain text (ie text/plain and NOT text/html), you are
still at risk of delivering e-mail containing uuencoded malware
(worms, trojans, and virus infected programs). The risk is not large,
because most worms send themselves as MIME attachments, not uuencoded,
but a uuencoded file is (or can be) part of a text/plain message and
is still recognized and decoded as an attachment by some MUAs.

Under the theory that false security is worse than no security, I would
say you can't be confident at all.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan