Fear-mongering was [thelist] odd IE worm or something.

[holmegm at comcast.net]

"Lonnie" <kr43m0r at earthlink.net> wrote:

>I had hoped that emails I receive from professional lists such as this would
>not contain the sort of fear-mongering crap that is usally spread by newbies
>who blindly "send this to everyone you know in your email address book" -
>then compromise ALL their friends' email addresses by stacking them all into
>the To: field of one email.

Er, the Messenger Service being abused is real, and I experienced it long
before there were any headlines.  I did finally figure out that it was a
service and needed to be disabled in Services.

IF that was what Tom was suffering from, the news articles actually probably 
would have helped him.  

Word-splitting aside, yeah, I'd consider it an exploit that anybody could just 
suddenly open windows with arbitrary content on my PC.  Comparing it to spam is 
like comparing telemarketing to some process by which my phone can be made to 
levitate, grow a loudspeaker, and shout ads into my living room whether I answer
it or not.  There is no particular reason that consumers should have had that 
service enabled by default, and have to figure out what an open port is, what a 
windows service is, etc.

-- 
Greg Holmes