Collective List Wit - Any thoughts?

It used to be that I simply deleted email attachments from unknown sources, but not those from friends. Then I
found out the hard way that an attachment from a friend may very well be his/her infected address book sending
the attachment, and that my friend had nothing to do with it.

Now when I receive an email attachment, (regardless of whom it's from), I always choose "Save attachments"
from the file menu, save them to my desktop, then run virus scan on them. Since using this method I've never
contracted a virus, but then McAfee has never found a virus in the attachments either. (As an added note, my
cable provider has deflected 2 virus-infected emails that were headed to my inbox.) Am I making a serious
error here? Should I simply delete all attachments, when even friends may unknowingly send viruses? My concern
lies in the fact that McAfee allowed a virus through even though my settings were supposed to scan email
attachments before opening. My faith in McAfee is rapidly degrading. However, I have new found hope since
downloading the version of ZoneAlarm that checks email (my previous version didn't).

One final note that may be of interest - I did contract a virus directly from a web site that McAfee didn't
catch. It was found during a free online virus scan at http://housecall.antivirus.com . Even though they were
able to clean it, it was not removed from the cab files in the "_Restore" folder. I reduced the amount of
space required for a system restore in order to delete the cab files infected. (Removing the attribute would
have accomplished the same thing, but since so many cab files were involved, it was faster the way I did it.)

Alan Thompson

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