Re: Virus attachments?

["Jim Ferris" <jferris@garlic.com>]

The only way that viruses can be eliminated from mailing lists that is 
totally reliable is by not allowing ANY attachments to be forwarded from the 
list. I know this will cause some folks a lot of headaches, but you have to 
realize that most of the readers of ridecamp are not very computer literate 
thus are very vulnerable to any virus. This means that they also are not very 
good at figuring out how to get rid of it. I have a virus checker at work 
that finds most all of the viruses but the most recent one on ridecamp was 
not picked up by it. Since I am computer savvy, I don't even attempt to open 
attachments unless they originate from within my company or come from a 
source that I trust. Even then I think long and hard about it. The major 
drawback to this action is that some posts will not be able to be recognized 
and will appear to be empty. The people that originate those posts will 
quickly figure out that they are not getting through and will switch to plain 
text or plain text plus html. The html part will be deleted but the plain 
text part will be sent.

I really can't see any benefit to the pretty email's that are sent to this 
list. Plain text would be much more desirable and there are other ways that 
pictures can be exchanged between members. If you could see how much junk is 
sent as attachments, then you would not be terribly reluctant to eliminate 
all attachments.

-Jim Ferris