is my system safe ?

Very bad. That shows that your using an unencrypted connection to your mail server. And it's also way less efficient than good Bayesian filters integrated in good eMail clients like Thunderbird, Opera M2 or Eudora.

Doesn't matter. IE with all patches applied has 60+ vulnerabilities, with lots of them being critical.

There are also some known unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows XP.

Doesn't matter. IE has never been intended to be used as a webbrowser, and no configuration will help.

Doesn't matter.

Why? If you don't need routing, why using a router?

Windows Firewall is a pretty good host-based packet filter, no need to resort to a lousy one with a lot of crap added.

Nah... you can read a reasonable definition of a "proof" on Wikipedia yourself.

Anyway, who cares for differentiating junk as spam, email viruses, bounces etc? It's just junk.

IE on the internet == pwn3d! IE on the internet with any arbitrary safe configuration == pwn3d! any future version of IE on the internet == pwn3d!

Got it?

Firefox and Opera are real webbrowser that are internet-safe.

I thought that as mailwasher does not download the email, just giving me a preview of the ones that passed through the isp spam filter, no wicky email or attachments are on my system. I find the proof in that no email viruses have ever got through, so it suits me. I also do not use admin password as i am only user, in fact i can't be arsed with all that password/logon business prefer to switch on and go :-)

Firefox and opera are alternative browsers not configuration of ie, or am i misunderstanding you, or perhaps vice versa.

So i am safe with this setup then.

Not entirely:

Peter

How should I? There's no real content, especially since it's McAfee.

Well, it can be safe:

Peter

And I'd say you should rather use a webbrowser for surfing the web. Firefox and Opera are not the only ones, there are many others, but at least you should conclucde that IE is not an option at all (skipping all the crap marketing Microsoft is spilling out, calling it a webbrowser).

Heck, it's even documented that surfing to an untrusted website with IE is equivalent to granting a remote shell, giving the website's owner full access to all your data.

But I guess you'd rather use a shoe as a hammer "because it always worked and never busted, and I don't like your so-called real hammers, as they're kinda unhandy in comparison to my shoe".

References?

It's commonly leet-speek overcapitalization of "owned" - your system doesn't belong just to you any more.

I was saying that i found opera and firefox to be crap and that i prefer to use ie. Firefox is not that fireproof anyway as there are still lots of unresolved security flaws, only opera is listed as having no outstanding security flaws, but neither are for me. What exactly is "pwn3d", some german slang or geek speek, please explain.

Is their somehow a real conversation possible with you, without having to decrypt your messages and to guess what you're claiming, without actually proving anything. As far as I'm concerned its just your opinion, and nothing more than that.

Firefox isn't as internet-safe as you claim.

Peter

Ah, thanks for clarifying that, but on the contrary my system has always belonged to me and always will, no hacker/tosser will get through to me with my safe setup.

That's not true. I use MW, I don't bounce any emails and I don't do any filtering either with it. What I do with Mailwasher is view any email at the pop3 server, and if I don't what that email, I delete it right then and there at the pop3 server.

I then through MW start OE and pull the emails I do want to the machine. OE has it's auto sending and receiving of emails on a timed basis and at start-up disabled. MW has served me well over the years and it's not a piece of junk, IMHO.

Yeah, I use Thunderbrid and OE for NG reader and OE for email. Why I continue to use Thunderbird is a mystery, maybe that it reads posts to a NG faster than OE on the initial NG read of all new posts.

What are you talking about? IE is used big time in Intranet Web solutions for corporate business. The fact is that nothing can match the over all power of IE in that environment. However, those same features are not geared to be used in a home environment, I'll give it that.

Yeah, and I have used FireFox in that environment just to see what FF would do. FF went turkey and wouldn't render things on the WEB page.

I use OE and FF and don't have a problem using IE. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I use IE on the Internet. FF is the default browser so when I click on an unknown link, it will start as it can't be attacked like IE. I don't surf that much any and only go to sites where I need to do business.

I have heard of FF and Opera being attacked too -- nothing is 100% as long as there is a human factor involved development wise or end-user.

Duane :)

At first there's nothing real said about Firefox.

At second, it's just brabbling from McAfee. Those guys who'd require you to enable ActiveX in MSIE's security zone "Internet" just that their damn GUI doesn't break.

At third, you really want to miss the point: Firefox being internet-safe means exactly that it doesn't have any security design flaws when processing untrusted data - which holds true when random, not systematic program errors are discovered.

There is no such thing like a safe setup for MSIE, even if Microsoft would fix all those 60+ currently unpatched security vulnerabilities. Actually one should reasonably assume your system to be compromised.

I didn't claim that it produces bounces at all. I claimed that a generic junk filter also filters bounces produced by someone else returned to you as a result of email address faking.

OK, with MSOE you're far away from a safe system.

Maybe MSOE totally sucks as a newsreader?

And that's the difference between a webbrowser and a browser.

Just that you don't notice the problem doesn't make it disappear.

Simply said, the question is not whether the website's owner could harm you, but just if he wants to.

There is no such thing like a safe website as long as third-party content is included. Yet again recently seen on MySpace.

Yes, and it has been fixed. Just like any random error. Internet safety implies that there are only random, but no systematic errors on processing untrusted data from the internet.

I wonder how IE could be fixed at all without a nearby complete rewriting.

It's a nice song and dance. It won't hold.

That's not the point.

I find that it does somethings better, like killfile someone across NG(s) and kills them removing the person killfiled as it sweeps the NG you're in on the initial kill. I also find OE's subject and content killing a post to be very good too. Thunderbird can't match it.

And I am here to tell you personally, as I have had to use killfile heavily.

You want to explain this one, because you're making no sense. A browser works with a Web site. The Web site sends HTML controls and script to the browser to execute at the client's machine. The browser then in turn posts the page back to the Web server to process on the server side. I don't see IE doing any different.

This is more side step talking here.

I am well aware of the issues with IE in the home environment.

This seems like more side step talking.

Yeah, a Human Being had something to do with it.

The fact that they can be attacked is all that counts.

What data are you talking about? Data doesn't control a browser. That's scripts, HTML controls and (Code Behind File .NET) that controls a browser.

Who cares about that with IE. It still leads the pack in browsers used. And if anything, MS will just buy out someone like Mozilla like they did Sysinternals and call it IE2 for the Home. ;-)

Duane :)

Why?

Yours, VB.

There's nothing about Firefox or Opera behind this link, but again a problem with Internet Explorer.

Yours, VB.

And don't say that this can't happen with Firefox. There are known cases of fly-by malware infections using flaws in the open source browser too, McAfee said.

Peter