[Spambayes] Anti -Virus

[Tim Peters]

[Keith Roos]
> Viruses are triggered by  opening an e-mail to read it. That's why
> it is standard practice to  set outlook not to preview the inbox.

Your computer had to "open the email" in the sense that spambayes opens it
just to *store* it in Outlook.  The message didn't get into Outlook to begin
with by magic.  The preview pane does very much more than that:  it fires up
the browser component, image viewers, sound players, and possibly (if your
settings are very lax) executes embedded script too.  spambayes does none of
that, it just retrieves the characters in the message, in encoded and
unexecuted form.

> Sure would be slick if your program could determine Spam with out
> opening the e-mail

Sorry, that's flatly impossible -- we can't score the words in the email
without seeing the words in the email.  No other program could either.

> and exposing the computer to viruses.

spambayes doesn't "open the e-mail" in the sense you have in mind.