Re: Virus's -- This is an Emacs bomb (fwd)

[friedman () gnu ai mit edu (Noah Friedman)]

Emacs mail readers don't evaluate local variables when they read in a
folder, because they are not visiting the file proper; they are reading in
formatted data (i.e. messages) from a file.  It doesn't make sense to
evaluate variables that are part of a message.

It's possible that very old versions of VM didn't protect against
this, but it was fixed a long time ago; at any rate, VM 5.72 (the current
version) is safe.  Rmail never had the problem.

In general, if you are paranoid about setting buffer-local variables when
you visit arbitrary files, you can put the following in your .emacs:

    ;; for emacs 19
    (setq enable-local-eval nil)
    (setq enable-local-variables nil)
    ;; for emacs 18
    (setq inhibit-local-variables t)


Too bad some people are so paranoid about security that they happily
sacrifice useful functionality.  After all, every other user on the system
is clearly out to get them using any available opportunity...