Except for the Outlook buffer overflows which only rely a message to be listed on the screen or opened, that is.
Well, the other M$-stylee option is to use Mailwasher first. www.mailwasher.net - basic delete/bounce without downloading. Why don't they include this kind of thing as *standard*?
Mailwasher's heuristics aren't too bad for catching spam, though sometimes something slips through.
For that matter, Mailwasher and Pegasus Mail* - http://pmail.com/ are both NZ-coded, so why don't they get their heads together and integrate the two. Tho' they work pretty well together already.
(* - which I've used since 1996 - looks like it too, but it does the job without too much crap - I usually recommend Pmail or Eudora to those poor bastards who don't know that the way to stop 95% of viruses is to not use fucking Outlook.)
I remember Pegasus Mail from the days of MS-DOS and Novell NetWare at Monash. It seemed easy to use though somewhat primitive.
Well, you could just use Mozilla mail in Windows instead. Mind you, I use Outlook XP and haven't ever contracted a virus. Just have decent antivirus software and keep it up-to-date, and it'll catch anything before it hits your inbox and strip attachments. And Outlook XP can be told not to automatically run any macros and stuff. What you mean is: "Can stupid Windows users just fuck off?"
Some version of Outlook is sufficiently brain-damaged to spread viruses, and sufficiently widely used to be responsible for the epidemic of viruses. It can't be just a matter of mass cluelessness; there must be badly-designed and insecure software exacerbating, if not causing, the problem.
The real problem is people sticking with the software that is on their computer and never upgrading... ever. I'd like to extend the call and tell everyone using a browser that doesn't support HTML 4.01 to please go and upgrade their browser. I remember hearing that call two years ago and we still have 10% of the market using Netscape 4.X. Why?
Now if everyone used Debian GNU/Linux, we wouldn't have this problem.
gee, I thought the outlook buffer overflow was fixed some months back? If everyone used product X instead of product Y we would have the problems associated with product X instead of the problems associated with product Y.
Yes. But if there was a wide range of different products, there would be less scope for viruses and exploits to work as they'd have a harder time of finding targets. It's the monoculture problem.
Also, Microsoft have a rather bad record as far as security goes. Systems such as MS Exchange, IIS, IE, Outlook, &c., have been afflicted by bugs and viruses more often than competing systems. Partly because of the monoculture problem and partly because of Microsoft's corporate culture and/or software development processes.
I use Eudora on Windows (too lazy to change operating systems; keep meaning too, and don't really have an excuse not to now that OpenOffice is up to scratch) - anyway, I just receive the damn things. They're all designed for unprotected Outlook users.
I believe what you really want to be asking is : don't open any attachments you didn't ask for. Don't send HTML emails. Filter out all email with attachments and HTML and you'll get no spam.