RE: [Asrg] Zombie spam

["Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker at verisign.com>]

I think folk are missing the reason that Windows mail is executable and unix
mail is not.

Unix mail systems are applications that do not integrate with the operating
system to any significant degree. There is no O/S repository, let alone a
repository of executable file types. The nearest equivalent to this is the
.mailcap [or was when I stopped using UNIX] which is a user maintained list
of file associations.

Windows has always had a repository for maintaining system and user level
settings. It is a much more coherent architectural approach than the VMS
system logical symbol tables or the UNIX approach of ignoring the issue. It
makes a great deal of sense to make the mailcap file a system level resource
and manage it through a common registry.

I don't think that the Microsoft engineers made a concious decision to allow
executable files to be exchanged directly via Internet email, it is just an
ill-considered consequence of the way the mail system emerged. Nobody really
thought about users clicking on executable email attachments comming from
people they did not know. Outlook and Exchange began life as X.400 mail
systems and nobody really worried much about the risk of malicious content
comming from outside the organization in X.400. The chance of the mail
servers talking...

When people proposed distribution of code over the Internet Microsoft led
the way with the Authenticode proposal. 


I think we should push for closing the email loophole as an on by default
feature of all edge mail servers, and in time all mail servers.

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