I had been wondering recently why I never got any email viruses. I was pleased about it, but I couldn’t figure out why everyone else seemed plagued by them and I never got any at all. As it turns out, I had a procmail recipe that I’d added a long time ago that was saving me a fair amount of grief. Here it is:

:0 HB:
* ^Content-Type:.*(application|audio|multipart)
* name=.*.(bat|exe|pif|vbs|swf|scr|xlq|zlq)
virus

I found a whopping 10 megs of email viruses in the virus folder once I realized that it was there.

Update: Nancy McGough sent me some information about that recipe, which you shouldn’t use because of this bug. (The bug hasn’t caused me problems because just by sheer coincidence the virus recipe is the last in my .procmailrc.) She provides some alternate recipes on her web site.