Date: Sat, 18 May 2002 14:48:42 -0400 From: Andrew J Caines <A.J.Caines@halplant.com> To: Joe Gwozdecki <joegw@neosoft.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sending attachments Message-ID: <20020518184842.GB605@hal9000.halplant.com> In-Reply-To: <005f01c1fe74$2a351d70$0300000a@lyon> References: <005f01c1fe74$2a351d70$0300000a@lyon>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Joe, > I notice some of you send in attachments with your posts. I can tell > you I never open them. Too dangerous to click on anything today, in > e-mail. I think you under the common misunderstanding that email itself is dangerous, when of course it's not. Email is nothing but a piece of text with at least one blank line in it. The danger comes only from the use of approximately one company's software products. Despite this company's very well-known record for producing fundamentally broken software which puts the user's data and system at risk simply by its use (which is the worst thing any software can ever do), a large number of people still seem to use it. I have no idea why. For example, I have used email for over a decade on many platforms and using many different mail clients and have never had any problems such as viruses, trojans, buffer overflows or other malware. > I would humbly suggest never sending attachments if you want more people > to read your stuff. It is just as easy to send it in the main body of > your message. Otherwise, count on a number of people, never seeing what > you wrote. That would be missing the point entirely. MIME is perfectly safe and is the only standard way of sending `files' by email. It provides a way to put the file in the message and to identify the type and name of the file for the recipient. In a group like this, it is useful to be able to send patches and other types of files. Trying to put this kind of content in the body of a message makes the job of extraction unnecessarily difficult and unreliable. What the recipient chooses to do with the mail and the file is entirely the responsibility of the recipient. Just because you send me a script which does a "fsck -y /", doesn't mean I have to save it, su to root and run it without reading it. So, in the end, perhaps instead you should advise others to "choose good software and use it sensibly" and maybe offer suggestions. Since you're posting to a FreeBSD group, you're mostly going to be preaching to the proverbial choir. -Andrew- -- _______________________________________________________________________ | -Andrew J. Caines- Unix Systems Engineer A.J.Caines@halplant.com | | "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary | | safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 | To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020518184842.GB605>