Tom Gardner wrote:

I started receiving e-mail with malicious virus attachments from forged
addresses pretending to be from people on the NG that I would normally read
their mail.

I see you are using Outlaw Express. A friend sent this to me very
recently so I could pass a warning to Windoze using friends:
"
Headline article in Friday's Sun. No longer is it necessary to open an
attachment to get the virus. "Looking at a message in a preview window
is enough . . " This is a yet another virus that propagates from the
host computer and allows hackers access to your info. It "exploits known
flaws in Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Media Player to run a
small hypertext language message that downloads the virus". M$'s latest
patch does not fix the problem.
"

You might wish to consider switching e-mail programs. Personally, I use
Polarbar
http://www.polarbar.org
which is a Java application and runs under Windoes, Linux and OS/2.

I switched to it because of its mail preview feature. I am on a dial-up
and when the Swen virus hit I was getting ~150 copies a day of these
~150KB pieces of garbage. The download time was simply prohibitive even
if they were deleted without harm. Using the preview, I see the
subject, to and from and the first part of any text - no HTML, no
attachments. I can the choose to download the whole e-mail or delete it
in the server without downloading it at all. Even if I download it,
only the text is displayed with flags to show and catalog any
attachments and their type.

I said I switched for the preview but since I've had it I've found more
and more features I really like and practically nothing that I don't
like. There is also a very responsive listserv if you do have a
problem.

I was using Netscape for e-mail with Java and JavaScript (not at all the
same) turned off but there was still HTML doing things I disapproved
of. Hasn't happened even once since the switch.

Usual disclaimer. And BBTW, it's free. :-)

Ted