[clue-tech] Linux vs. Windows security

[Bruce Ediger]

On Fri, 22 Jan 2010, Jed S. Baer wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:04:13 -0700 (MST)
> Bruce Ediger wrote:
>
>> Somewhere, I read that before Outlook, if you'd mentioned
>> making email content executable, people would have looked at you like
>> you had a hole in your head.  And that's very true.
>
> IIRC, the first instance of executable e-mail was when Netscape decided
> to use HTML markup in Communicator, and enable, by default, JavaScript,
> since it used the same HTML renderer as Navigator.

Actually, the old NeXT system had an email client you could just drag-n-drop
"apps" into.  That was the reason I bought a NeXT, back in 1991.  It was cool,
and I mentally debated sending my gullible NeXT-friends a malicous "app",
but I never did it.  The NeXT folks eventually campaigned *against* NeXTMail,
and it ended up quite uncool to send someone anything other than plain text.

Oddly, the old NeXTMail system was far more "unixy" than the current MIME based
system. It created a directory structure with all the stuff you'd dragged-n-
dropped into the email, tar'ed it up, and compressed the tar file, then
uuencoded the tar.Z file and SMTP'ed that.  It was like someone kind of
off-handedly created it as a quick hack, not as the carefully spec-ed out MIME
and "multi-part-text-encoded" nominally multi-platform, but wink wink nudge
nudge Windows-partial thing we've got today.