From: "Geo." 

Rich,

virus get people to click on exe files, hell they give them a password and
have them type that password in to unzip the damn virus, how hard is it to
ask them for their password? And no it's not an extra layer of protection,
it's a partial extra layer of protection with a great big bullseye hole in
the middle of it. These guys always have to leave some loophole open. If
they were making a view all as text option then shouldn't it view ALL as
text?

But the part that really gets me, of all the mail flying around the
internet, such a small part is signed that this just makes no sense at all,
it's just loophole waiting for the virus writers. It should be OFF by
default with an option to display signed as html if the user want's to turn
it on, and it should be easy to turn on/off while reading the message not
as a universal setting.

But that's ok, you don't need to justify it to me, just wait and see what
happens. The only saving grace is so few users have a cert with which to
sign emails that there may not be enough of them for a virus to reach
critical mass.

Geo.

"Rich"  wrote in message news:406c895d{at}w3.nls.net...
   I don't know about you but for me to send a signed message I need to
enter my password again.  A trojan, even overlooking that I have never been
infected by one, would have to have my password.  It may require UI to get
it.  Beyond that, an insignificant number of people even have certs.  And
even then, there is no vulnerability here.  It's just an extra layer of
protection for the very small number of paranoid people that are
sophisticated enough to understand but not enough to be safe due to
intelligence.

   If you really want to be extremely paranoid, use Outlook 2003 which has
an option to read signed email in plain text too.  Understand that this
violates the principal of digitally signed email that what is presented to
the recipient is what the sender signed.  If you don't mind that this may
render the signature meaningless, go ahead and check that option.

Rich

  "Geo."  wrote in message
news:406c6ca4$1{at}w3.nls.net...
  http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307594

  It's a KB article describing how to set outlook 2002 so it reads emails as
  plain text. Soon as I heard about this I went to read it and to my dismay
it
  says:

  "This article describes a new feature that is added to Outlook 2002 in
  Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 1 (SP-1). This feature permits users to
  configure Outlook to read all non-digitally-signed e-mail or nonencrypted
  e-mail messages in plain text format."

  What idiot figured that digitally signed email is safe? Don't these fools
  realize that all the email virus grab your friends email addresses out of
  your address book and spread to them next. If you have a digital signature
  the virus has access to that.. This is as dumb as thinking you can trust
  email from an address you know.

  Geo. (they just don't get it)

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