Virus warning

Earl Young eayoung at bna.com
Wed Feb 5 07:15:33 EST 1997


     It's a good question, and I can respond by saying that I know 
     intelligent people who use Word as their email viewer.  Makes no sense 
     to me, but Microsoft is pushing it in some circles by pointing out all 
     of the plug-ins Microsoft makes available to translate email into HTML 
     and such.
     
     Earl Young


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Virus warning
Author:  rmorgan at Harding.edu at INTERNET
Date:    2/4/97 10:21 AM


This may be a dumb question, but why would you want to use MS word (or 
any word processor, for that matter) as the email viewer?  I have 
evaluated several email programs, and I don't recall any of them having a 
"bad" viewer.  At least, not bad enough to justify making it view the 
email with a word processor... 
     
And on top of that, knowing that a macro virus could be in an email would 
make me think even more before I make MS word the viewer... 
     
Also, since I don't have MS word (nor do I care too), doesn't a macro 
have to be executed?  If so, isn't it true that reading an infected 
message in MS word would not cause any harm to your computer?  Or does MS 
word have some sort of auto-execute feature?  If they don't auto-execute, 
then it is still true that the simple act of reading a message will not 
cause harm to your computer, no matter what virus is contained in the 
message. Right? 
     
     
Ronnie Morgan 
Team OS/2 
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