Email: POP vs. IMAP
Rebecca Blood over at Rebecca's Pocket wrote on Monday how she avoided a the worms and virii of the last few weeks. Actually, she didn't talk much about Blaster, but she had some good advice on avoiding viruses...such as, don't use Microsoft email products, which are the targets of most email worms. I'll go her one better by saying "Don't use POP email." Go with an IMAP provider. My favorite is Fastmail.
The biggest difference between POP and IMAP is the storage model. Normally with POP you go online and download your messages to local storage. If you want to avoid viruses this way, you need something that lets you look at your mail before you download it. IMAP, on the other hand, is really an email storage protocol. Under normal circumstances your messages are all kept on the server, available to any machine with an IMAP client such as Pine, Mulberry (the client software I use), Eudora, Outlook or Outlook Express, or through webmail, if the provider gives you that option. Fastmail even provides online antivirus protection for email, as well as easy-to-use filtering. Some email clients let you make copies of your IMAP message folders offline. You can learn a lot more about IMAP and the Pine email client at Nancy McGough's Infinite Ink site. (Both the Pocket PC's built-in mail client and WebIS's @Mail support IMAP servers as well).
Of course, the only way to avoid Blaster is to patch Windows properly...or just don't use Windows...
9:13:23 AM 
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