E-Mail Virus Protection Handbook

Introduction

One of the lessons I learned early in life is to never confess the stupid things that I have done in public—unless there’s a good punch line at the end of the story. Well, there is really no punch line at the end of the story I am about to tell you, but I am going to tell it anyway, because it helps introduce some of the key issues and concepts involved when securing e-mail clients and servers.

In 1994, I was browsing the Web with my trusty version of Netscape Navigator (version 1.0—yes, the one that ran just great on a Windows 3.11 machine that screamed along on top of an ultra-fast 486 processor). While browsing, I found a Web page that was selling a really nifty Telnet client. This piece of software had everything: I could use ...