There are several techniques worth trying.

The first thing is that the .zl9 extension is a red herring.
Extensions of the form .zl#, where # represents a number, are
added by Zone Alarm to prevent you from accidentally running a
dangerous file.

I would open it in a pure text editor, like Microsoft Notepad or
NoteTab, NOT IN A WORD PROCESSOR LIKE MS WORD which
could run dangerous macros.  It might be a pure binary, but it
might be a text file or include some text which you can search for
in the virus databases.  NoteTab will open some binaries and let
you read the text inside of them, but I don't know about Notepad.

What other security software do you own? Symantec/Norton, for
example, has a service where a user can send them a file of which
he is suspicious, but which Norton Anti-Virus didn't catch, and
within a few days they will tell him what they can find out about it.

On 6 Nov 2001 at 12:34, rdavidl wrote:

> I don't filter my email, and I get quite a bit of spam, which I forward to
> Spam Cop. Today I received an email message with the subject !"#$ (obviously
> spam) but no message, just an attachment named pbrush.zl9.
<SNIPPED> > How can I find out if the file is safe without opening it?

Thank you.
David Jonathan Justman

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