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On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 10:46:55AM +0000, Neil Winchurst wrote: > That is what I thought. So what would happen, it would just sit there > and do nothing, or an error message perhaps? "Do nothing" is the short and ultimately correct answer. But it depends on a) the kind of attachment and b) what you instruct your computer to do with these kinds of files (or what you have instructed your computer to automatically do with them). It is likely a Windows executable, possibly stored inside a ZIP file. These won't run on Linux, but they may run in Wine. It's pretty unlikely for them to do any harm to your system, because its structure looks different, but at least in theory it could connect to a control server and receive instructions and even send spam, or participate in a DDoS attack. (Note that the same is true for running Linux malware inside an emulator on Windows.) If you run it from the Linux command line, you'll get an error like run-detectors: unable to find an interpreter for [filename] It is also possible that the attachment is a malicious document, say a PDF file. In that case, the document is likely to do something malicious based on some peculiarity in the PDF reader, so if you don't use Acrobat for Windows, you're probably going to be fine. But the safest will always be not to try it. :-) Martijn. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq