Reliance on Microsoft called risk to U.S. security

Kevin T. Neely ktneely at astroturfgarden.com
Wed Oct 1 18:59:06 EDT 2003


bear allegedly wrote...

> "Can be relied on to _only_ deliver text" is a valuable and important
> piece of functionality, and a capability that has been cut out of too
> many protocols with no replacement in sight.

Is delivery really the problem, though?  You can deliver all the code you want to an e-mail account which I check using pine and none of it will ever run.  I think that the problem is that the mail clients in question have the ability to interpret the code.  HTML?  It's text-only, but contains a number of features that, when implemeted, produce what I think we'd all call undesirable results.

I could send a message that says:

helo somenastydomain.com
mail from spammer at nowhere.net
rcpt johndoe at yahoo.com
data
here's some viagra I'd like to sell you
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