On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 07:09:32AM -0500, Douglas Quebbeman wrote: Clearly you have to decide which problem is more serious: - Outlook _does exhibit_ these problems (because of the lazy sysadmins and swarming script kiddies)? - Outlook _can exhibit_ these problems? (because of the lack of checking for buffer overflows, incredibly complicated code, difficulty of knowing if you've turned all the insecure features off, etc.) Suppose Emacs suddenly became the most popular mail client. A whole bunch of exploits would no doubt appear. I would trust the Emacs community more than I would trust Microsoft to understand the bugs being exploited, change the code, and release the changes. And I'm with Doc -- the way MS writes programs makes them horribly insecure, and the second point above is probably more serious than the first. BTW, Emacs can execute code in a file when it reads the file, so (in some fundamental sense) it's just as dangerous as Outlook. But there are only two variables that control this feature, so if I turned it off, I would feel more confident than with Outlook that it stayed off. I wouldn't feel completely confident, though. Relatively few people can write Emacs viruses, or would want to -- if that changed, I would probably feel less confident in the Emacs source code. -- Derek