What IS the threat from Full eMail Attachments?
I constructed the diagram above in the form of insulating layers surrounding the system’s network core to help demonstrate that the operating system’s MTA and SMTP protocol layers serve to protect the Internet from direct access by malicious attachments roaming around in eMail. Any system whose fundamental architecture prevents attachments from arriving in eMail will be MUCH harder to exploit. Until the advent of RFC 822, the most common and familiar, complex, potent, and untraceable Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service attacks have only been generated by spammers. Due to the sheer volume of RFC 822 compliant machines soon to be loose in the world, spammers will quickly be supplanted as the premiere launching pad for new torrents of eMails. This will have an unfortunate corollary effect for eMail users: The huge number of eMail client machines will motivate spammers to find new ways into those machines — AND THEY WILL. Then users of eMail clients will become the most sou
