Vulnerability Development mailing list archives

Re: Netscape mail reader oddity


From: "Silvio L. Nisgoski" <nisgoski () softone com br>
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 17:22:40 -0200

Hi,
        Yes, here it occurs also. Just select a message with attachments, and
click around the top right corner.

[]
Silvio

Mikael Olsson wrote:

Hi,

I've seen something _really_ weird with the netscape mail reader,
and I wonder if anyone else has seen it.

A couple of times, I've managed to completely alter the message
display in the mail reader, by clicking around and selecting
text in the message (I do this all the time when I read
texts, don't ask me why).

All of a sudden, the message display changed to something that...
Well, I don't really know. It looked like the old Internet
Mail&News display, with the text covering the top 80% of the
message display, and a list of icons for the attachments at
the bottom 20%, in its own frame. (By the way, I only have
IE3 installed on my computers; I never use IE so I haven't
bothered to upgrade, for several reasons).

Either there is a feature in Netscape that I don't know of,
but the more likely explanation is that all of a sudden, netscape
decided to hand the mime message over to the Windows OLE host or
something like that, which ended up displaying it in Internet
Mail&News instead.

Now, why I am posting this to vuln-dev?

At least in my case, there is a huge difference in how mail
is handled by my netscape installation and "internet mail&news".
I've got all javascript and java turned off in netscape. This
is not the case in "internet mail&news".

Could it be possible to remotely cause this to happen?
I don't know.
If it is, I'd likely find myself in a heap of problems unless
I disable everything in explorer (which I now have done).
All of a sudden, all javascript and java embedded fun would
work just as it did a couple of years ago. Ouch.

(No, do NOT advise me to install IE4/5 to get the security
zones. I do NOT want a file handler that doesn't know how
to differentiate between the www and my local drives.)

Uhm.. Well, that's it, really. I don't really expect anyone
to dive head-first into a full-out investigation, but
if anyone's seen or heard anything about this, I for one
would be interested in hearing about it.

--
Mikael Olsson, EnterNet Sweden AB, Box 393, S-891 28 ÖRNSKÖLDSVIK
Phone: +46 (0)660 29 92 00         Direct: +46 (0)660 29 92 05
Mobile: +46 (0)70 66 77 636        Fax: +46 (0)660 122 50
WWW: http://www.enternet.se/       E-mail: mikael.olsson () enternet se


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