At 3:10 PM -0500 6/26/03, gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)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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