I checked with a nerdy geek and was told that it is a waste of
bandwidth to broadcast attachments to an entire mailing list.  
Although not every attachment is a virus, NO ASCII text is.
Dr. Knodt's suggestion is entirely consistent with email etiquette.

----- Forwarded message from Thomas Gatliffe -----

Dr. Knodt,
    Perhaps you should make an appointment with some nerdy geek in the IR
department who can explain to you how viruses get promulgated.  It is usually
through executables (.exe) files or microsoft macros.  Otherwise you will
continue to be needlessly worried about non-existent threats.  :-)
Tom G.

----- End of forwarded message from Thomas Gatliffe -----

--

      _
     | |                    Robert W. Hayden
     | |          Work: Department of Mathematics
    /  |                Plymouth State College MSC#29
   |   |                Plymouth, New Hampshire 03264  USA    
   | * |                fax (603) 535-2943
  /    |          Home: 82 River Street (use this in the summer)
 |     )                Ashland, NH 03217
 L_____/                (603) 968-9914 (use this year-round)
Map of New        hay...@oz.plymouth.edu (works year-round)
Hampshire         http://mathpc04.plymouth.edu (works year-round)

The State of New Hampshire takes no responsibility for what this map
looks like if you are not using a fixed-width font such as Courier.

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in
overalls and looks like work." --Thomas Edison

        Here's the gimmick. The ANSI escape sequences did not just change text
and background color - they also moved the cursor. Once the programmers
were thinking about the keyboard, somebody had the idea of including a
(rarely-used) ANSI escape sequence to allow the keys to be remapped (to
facilitate international ckeyboard layouts, I supppose.) To make things
like dead accent keys work here, they allowed a key to be remapped to
more than one character. Being true programmers of the old school, they
did not limit this to the two or three characters that anybody actually
needed.

        RESULT: You could in principle insert (undisplayed) ANSI escape
sequences into an arbitrary text string that would map the ENTER key to
"FORMAT C:", set several other keys to "Y", and make the display
black-on-black from the cursor point onwards. Somebody impetuous enough
to react to an apparently stuck display by hammering keys at random
might actually not only initiate the command to erase their hard drive
but also
"verify that this was what they wanted".  This sort of thing was
actually tested, according to a 1990-vintage virus protection book I
used to have. The solution was a modified ANSI.SYS file that did not
support key remapping, or limited the length of the remapped string. I
used to have one of these on my machine.

        It has been conjectured that a truly brilliant writer of short
assembler code might have been able to load and run a .com executable in
this fashion, from a text string.  Remember, a program is just a string
of
characters - especially a .com which has very little "rubric" at the
head.
In principle you can create a program with a word processor if it does
not use one of a few truly unprintable characters. However, AFAIK this
was never successfully done.

        The moral is that anything can be a virus if there is something to run
it.  Code doesn't just run itself.  Of course, this is true of
executables as well - an executable only runs when the OS puts it into
the CPU.
        -Robert Dawson

the pragmatic of the situation is:

DO NOT SEND ANY ATTACHMENTS TO ANY LIST

this has PARTLY to do with virus spreading potential but ... partly to
courtesy ... and partly due to the fact that when downloading your messages
say at home ... on a modem ... you can't get to the NEXT message without
taking time to have the attachment downloaded too ... whether you opt to
look at it or not

        But, by the same token, a 10K attachment is no more pernicious than the
same 10K included as text, and less so than a 1K HTML file that
immediately downloads 50K of images from another site without checking
for permission.

        -Robert Dawson

Drake Bradley
Bates College

in eudora, we can insert an image to the text space ... and this can be
neat ... but, some may be able to see it in the text ... or, get it as an
attachment ... but, i have had some feedback that doing this CAN goof
things up too ... at their end (the technicalities of why i don't know)

i can certainly just attach stuff and send ...

it is all i can do on some occasions ... NOT to add to the message or as an
attachment ... someTHING ... perhaps a pic ...

but, i just resist sending any attachments to any list ... for a variety of
reasons ...

i use http://www.copernic.com ... a nice desktop search tool ... and one
nice thing about it is you can save your search results as a browser
webfile ... and then send AS AN ATTACHMENT to a person, list, etc. ... and
when they open the attachment ... it IS already in an opened ie or netscape
... so you get the benefits of the short url descriptions and workable
links ... BUT, even there, i hesitate to send this attachment to a list
(who knows what evil might parasite itself along with it?)

i know that sometimes ... one might have something to share ... and it
would be MUCH easier to share it once ... rather than say ... "i have a pic
i can send to anyone who wants it ... send me a note" ... and this makes
FAR more work for the sender (so, they opt for NOT doing anything with
it)  AND, invariably, one then gets posts to the entire list rather than to
the specific person who has the 'thing' to share

sure is a tangled web we live in

Some attachments are binary, some are not.  
Standard HTML files are ASCII, with the added 'risk'
(I sometimes look at it that way) of invoking an
immediate internet connection.