let's torture and kill virus writers

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Derek Martin writes:
	 Sure.  But if people Stopped using MS Office for creating e-mail, and just
	 wrote it in a text editor or the e-mail client's editor, this would not be
	 a problem.  

Sure, but this would imply that they were concerned with making  sure
that recipients could read their messages. We have lots of experience
now that shows what a poor assumption this is.  After all, people are
generally  familiar  with  the  problems  reading Word documents on a
different release of Word than the sender used.  Microsoft can't even
make the text legible to all Word users. But people keep sending Word
attachments even when they are aware of these problems.

There is one argument that has gotten  a  few  "No  Word  attachment"
decrees  from  on  high:   It seems that Word documents often contain
"deleted" text left over from previous documents.  Such text  is  not
visible  if  you  have  the same release of Word, but to other people
(especially to those not using Word but who know how to use the  Unix
"strings" command), all that "deleted" text is readable.  Any manager
who is aware of this is going to flatly ban all Word  attachments  to
anyone  outside  the immediate organization.  They can easily contain
portions of any earlier message in the sender's email folders.

No sensible business manager would ever permit this sort of danger to
the company.

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