[Spambayes] Anti -Virus

[Skip Montanaro]

    Keith> Viruses are triggered by opening an e-mail to read it. That's why
    Keith> it is standard practice to set outlook not to preview the inbox.

It's what a program does once it's opened the file that is the problem.
Outlook may determine the file is a Word document then automatically ship it
off to Word to open.  That exposes the user to any Word macro viruses the
file may contain.  SpamBayes does nothing like that.  It opens the file and
reads the contents.  It never executes the contents, nor does it ask other
programs to do so.

I'm immune to Word macro viruses on my machine not because SpamBayes doesn't
open such files but because:

    * I have no software on my machine which would execute Word macros

    * If I did, SpamBayes wouldn't ask it to load the file

In short, to be infected by a virus you have to coax the relevant subsystem
to execute the file.  Simply reading the bytes doesn't cause the virus to
infect the computer.

Skip