On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, snit snat wrote:
>
> > It's an incestuous little beasty, stealing addresses out of address books
> > and using some to forge headers and spoof from addresses, while using the
> > rest of the addresses in the book to replicate itself.
> >
> > Microsoft's Outhouse needs to go the way of the rotary dial telephone,
> > right along with Exploder. Not that other OSes/apps are impervious to
> > malware, mind you but....
>
> This is one of the reasons I still use Pine. I telnet in, read my
> posts, avoid all the html shit (it's just gibberish on my text
> screen), and send text messages quite quickly and efficiently.
> Can't think of a good reason to use Outlook, and as
> Kel points out above, there are many good reasons not to.
>
> Has a Unix system using pine ever been exploited like
> Windows/Outlook? (I hope the answer is no, so we can cite
> yet another example of the gross inefficiency and incompetence
> of capitalist production.)
>
for an example, see
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2000/05/msg01181.html
"- YOUR HAVE NOW RECEIVED THE UNIX VIRUS -
This virus works on the honor system:
If you're running a variant of unix or linux, please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random."
But seriously, UNIX systems are subject to vulnerabilities, and can get hacked into, though they're often attacked via non-email vectors.
It is possible for you to delete all your files on your directory in your unix account, by inadvertently executing code that does that. However I don't think that pine will execute code based on the contents of an email you read.
-gr