Vivien M. wrote: Someone made the argument to me privately that the problem is that MS lets you run attachments from Outlook, while other clients would require you to save the files to disk. That's not a solution: if these people are like my parents used to be, they'd dutifully save the attachment, open up a file manager, and open it up to see the "cool new screensaver" their best friend sent them ("hey, even if it's a virus, I have an antivirus" is the usual excuse). Sure, that's three steps instead of one, but for as long as the HUMAN behind the keyboard wants to open the attachments, whether it takes two clicks or fifty keystrokes, that attachment will get open.

Indeed. I remember the good old days when I was working with an OS called Flex, which was designed mainly for S-100 machines running the 6809 processor (ISTR that it was a competitor to something called OS/9). Anyway, when one wanted to delete a file or do something like that, it asked "are you sure" and your had to type "y" and then it asked "are you really sure" and you had to type "y" again. After a while our brains rewired our fingers so whenever the "y" key was required it was hit twice in a row, which eventually led to new words (spell check was unknown at the time) such as yyankee, honeyy, new-yyorker, and so on. We ended up hacking the kernel so it did not ask twice....

and ISTR one patch for Outlook 2000 that blocked your ability to save executables was released)

It default in Outlook XP and Outlook 2003, which has prompted large numbers of persons to download Winzip, which as not stopped worms to be propagated as you pointed out. Michel.