On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 11:34:38AM -0400, Shawn H. Corey wrote:
No, I don't open *.doc attachments, they may contain viruses.
Any file can contain a virus. The only useful question is does the program you're opening the file in have any exploitable vulnerabilities. MS Word has shown that it's pretty happy to run whatever code it finds, as in fact most programs are. I particularly like:
http://www.coyotos.org/download/WebInstall.html
Valid attachments are; *.txt, *.pdf, *.svg
Plain text files are normally OK, but Adobe Acrobat has been the subject of exploitable bugs[1] and SVG interpreters are just as complicated.
Given that your email comes from a Thunderbird running on a Unix box (or at least it says it's running through an X connection) a better reason would be that you prefer not to use proprietary file formats. If it's not the file format you mind about then I've had good luck with OpenOffice and antiword--the latter should be simple enough not to have too many exploitable vulnerabilities.
Everything else is ignored.
I'd love to live in a world like that!