train on viruses? multipart/mixed

[Dave Lovelace]

Peter Bishop wrote:
> 
> On 25 Feb 2004 at 7:07, Jef Poskanzer wrote:
> 
> > >Jef, that's an absurd suggestion.  Email must contain the ability to
> > >send attachments
> > 
> > No, it really doesn't.
> > 
> 
> That might be true for you, but you cannot decide that 
> for everyone else.
> I just could not function effectively without using attachments
> to exchange documents, spreadsheets. etc

I rarely include attachments, but when I do I REALLY need to.  But that's
kind of beside the point here.  I receive quite a few messages with
multipart/mixed, over and above all the spam (some of which may be viruses).
Scanning just mail received during February from this list alone, there
are a dozen or so.  I may hate this (I use a text-only mail reader, elm),
but I can't possibly justify just blackholing things on this one basis.
For personal correspondents with whom I frequently exchange mail I sometimes
ask them to try to turn of HTML or whatever, but it'd be pretty unreasonable
of me to do so for every list poster, etc.  I have no real input into what
they use to send mail & how it's configured, & that's the way it should be.

-- 
- Dave Lovelace
  dave at firstcomp.biz
  davel at cyberspace.org