[rescue] (Offtopic) X-Message-Flag fun for Outlook users

[Ethan O'Toole]

-- Ethan O'Toole - 757 Technologies - www.757tech.com
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On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, William Kirkland wrote:

> On Aug 1, 2006, at 12:13, rescue-request at sunhelp.org wrote:
>
> > Message: 7 Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 14:31:23 -0400 From: Charles Shannon
> > Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> Subject: Re: [rescue] (Offtopic)
> > X-Message-Flag fun for Outlook users To: The Rescue List
> > <rescue at sunhelp.org> Message-ID:
> > <20060801183122.GC12931 at widomaker.com> Content-Type: text/plain;
> > charset=us-ascii
> >
> > Sat, 29 Jul 2006 @ 14:18 -0700, Devin L. Ganger said:
> >
> One would have to ignore the damage Microsoft has accomplished, prior
> to giving credit to their solutions. The primary security hole for
> email viruses' has not changed since Microsoft has introduced it. MS
> word, excell, powerpoint, etc ...; all allow macros. These become
> security holes when those types of documents are automatically opened
> (even by a preview feature). This is then code, executed prior to
> confirming the source. No amount of scanning will alter that design
> flaw. If the applications could only modify the display, some of the
> capabilities could be retained.

Yea, Macros in documents were a bad idea. But I don't believe those
viruses are widespread today. Perhaps I am wrong, but coming from a UNIX
engineering house where management wanted modern Exchange, I never once
saw any of this. Perhaps Trend Micro's small business virus scanner was
cleaning it all up... I'm not sure.

But it has been a while since we had the widespread devestating exploits
like winnuke, or the Microsoft web server worms, that effected the
majority of systems on the intarweb.

I use pine, and there have been similiar exploits for it. Of course not as
widespread, since, well according to the rap songs no one uses outdated
pine anymore. It has no problems dealing with HTML email and all that fuss
either.

Being forced to use outlook, I just clicked the box that defaulted it to
plaintext. I still had issues with it forcing me to top post though.

It's bendable, there are options for a bunch of crap so I'd be willing you
can make it behave.

As far as Unix versus Microsoft, I tried to battle a guy in a debate that
UNIX is easier to secure in an enterprise, and lost. I think he might have
been right, that a Microsoft environment (to someone knowledgable in that
environment) can be secured.

I'm not backing it fully, but there are plenty of environments running
Windows (and I've been in them), where the common users are BEAT DOWN.
They can't do whatever they want with the computers, and this helps
maintain control.

UNIX platforms and open source software is sort of getting there, but the
business apps that the corporations use, and the ease of use, just isn't
there. People were too busy making window managers instead of email with
integreated calendaring, scheduling, project management, document
management.

It's sad that as bad as Microsoft is, it's really that far ahead of the
open source stuff in many regards.

Bash it all you want, it will be a while before the corporations can leave
it.

Microsoft Sharepoint... show me an open source alternative? None. You can
buy Livelink and all of that, but your looking at serious engineering and
programming costs.

Exchange? Show me a good open source alternative. Even some of the linux
ones like Scalix required IE as the web browser when I last saw it. Yes
you can get iCal and IMAP and plugins and all this stuff, but it isn't
quite as integreated.

*shrug*

I don't mind the Microsoft crap that much,as long as I don't have to admin
it anymore or see it :-)

Coming from a place where I had to admin both, there were many times when
you like !@#$*(!@#ING POS EXCHANGE! If this were UNIX, I could dump these
logs out and find what I need in seconds!

Then the flip side were true... "If I had time to write big scripts, this
would be as quick as Exchange/SBS2003"

My biggest gripe with Microsoft products is that it isn't controlled by
.ini files. If it was simple text based files and text driven logs and
everything, with GUI wrappers, I'd be happier.

				-- Ethan