[Sca-cooks] ...... has a virus

[Brett McNamara]

If you use Microsoft Outlook and have any bell or whistle turned one,
NEVER open spam.  Don't even have the preview option set up. 
Microsoft, in it's attempt to be helpful, allows code to be executed
on the first open event of an email.  They have internal, implicit
functionality that uses this (e.g. has message been read), so at some
level it can't be turned off.

A common piece of code out there will start harvesting emails from
your Outlook contacts and everyone you've ever sent email to.  Then
they either beam the booty to the mother ship or use your client to
propagate.

Let's be clear, we're talking mail worms, trojans, and virii here, not
the usual stuff that simply offers to enlarge or reduce some part of
you.  Still, every piece of spam is potentially putrefied.  When you
use Outlook as your client, your risk is amplified greatly.

On my home PC, I only read mail in a non-IE web browser.  I've used
Firefox and it's prior incarnations for over four years now.  It's
quite comparable to the MS browser and significantly safer.

Currently, I love my Gmail account.  It's threading methodology makes
it ideal to read things like, well, mailing lists.


Wistan