Computer viruses and trojans are a routine part of the electronic world, so most office email servers automatically check incoming messages and attached files for the malicious hitchhikers. If a message contains unknown executable programs that resemble viruses, the scanning software often plays safe and deletes the file, or doesn’t open it. However, this means important messages can get lost or delayed.
Simon Wiseman suggests a better way: encrypting suspicious messages, so that any code in attached programs becomes scrambled and is therefore put out of harm’s way (US 2004/0139334). A copy would then be shunted to a “sandbox” in the form of a separate PC…
