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Eek - holding up e-mail for 24 hours is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Why not just use the Post Office, or is that in danger of spreading "real" viruses between doctors? If they are being told e-mail only works on Windows, well it is easy to tell them otherwise. Word documents "easy to secure" - hmm someone should tell Microsoft how to do it then ;) The answer to the active content in e-mail problem is to not use formats that send active content, or badly written mail clients that can be conned into executing too much, or OSes that provide too little protection against malicious code. I've built systems that do it, and sell a firewall that does it as part of it's SMTP proxy. The real question is why the hell didn't the Pentagon whitelist acceptable file formats before the viruses started sending random documents out by e-mail. 24 hours for antivirus software to be updated and delivered - not a chance - it may happen occasionally but in my experience it is usually days or weeks before updates appear, although often the virus isn't that widespread in the early days. Certainly one of the recent IIS viruses was around and scanning for the IIS to IIS part of the transfer several days before antivirus experts got the code disassembled and started telling us exactly what it was doing. Surely we shouldn't have to tell doctors that the way to avoid getting infected by viruses is good hygiene, and proper protocols for the handling of hazardous materials. Not just stocking up on antibiotics, and antiviral agents ;) You'd only open a vial with some nasty unknown viral agent in a fume cupboard, or with negative pressure safeguards, to contain leakage in the event of an accident. I don't see mail attachments being so very different. -- Are you using the Internet to best effect ? www.eighth-layer.com Tel: +44(0)1395 232769 ICQ: 116952768 Moderated discussion of teleworking at news:uk.business.telework -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.