[CLUE-Tech] don't know much about viruses

[R Frank]

I had a piece of email bounce from where I sent it with
this message.

... while talking to gto-mailer1.bbn.com.:
>>> DATA
<<< 570 This message is being returned because it may contain a virus.
554 tmitchel at bbn.com@cam-smtp1.bbn.com... Remote protocol error

The email I sent was plain text, no attachments, using sylpheed as 
the mail application.  The only thing wrong was I had mistyped a 
url as "htp://www.a2w.net/karel/index.html" in the body
of the message.  To see if that potentially triggered the bounce,
I resent it verbatim except htp became http and it went through
just fine.

But it was a wakeup call.  I've not faced potential viruses on the 
Linux side, and I don't check for any viruses.  On the Windows side 
at school, we are fighting viruses all the time on floppies the
students bring from home.  I'm thinking a virus cannot jump from
a windows partition to a Linux partition, and though some viruses
attack the boot block, would they somehow make it onto a Linux
floppy?  And this was an email in question.  I thought that email
needed to have attachments to carry a virus -- plain text was safe.

Is virus protection something I need to start paying attention to?

Roger Frank