OK, lissen up, you Windows-folks. You’re tired of us Mac users saying “Gee, that must be a drag, I’m glad we don’t have to worry about that stuff”, followed by “psst – get a Mac!”. For your own reasons, you are using a PC and we’ll assume for the moment that you’ll be using one tomorrow, too. So I’m not going to tell you to get a Mac.
Not quite.
Get Basilisk II. It’s free. Then find someone who has an old Mac of the Quadra/Centris era (preferably; slightly older, such as a IIci or IIsi, would be OK in a pinch. No Power Macs though). If necessary, buy one on eBay or from the back 800-number ad pages of MacAddict or MacWorld magazine, you should be able to land one for less than a good dinner in a nice restaurant. Run the included ROM copying utility.
Follow the instructions for downloading the free Macintosh System 7.5 (Apple chose to make these older OS’s available w/o charge) and then download and install a Macintosh email client such as Eudora or Outlook or whatever you like.
Basilisk is a damn good emulator – fast enough that I can even run Basilisk II as a program within VirtualPC, an emulator within an emulator, with decent responsiveness. Give your “Mac” an IP address and send and receive all your email from there.
You can reference your entire “My Computer” from the Mac environment, and therefore attach files to outbound emails with no problem, and similarly drag attachments from the Mac environment out into your “real world” after examining them in the Mac environment to verify that they are safe.
It’s like quarantining your entire email sending-receiving tasks. Not one single known email virus or worm is going to execute in that environment. Nor is one likely to ever appear: the Mac you’d be emulating runs on the Motorola 680x0 family of chips, not the modern PowerPC family, and the OS you’d be running on it is the old “Classic” type, not the modern Unix-based MacOS X. If a Mac email virus were to make an appearance at this point, it’s by far most likely to be one that executes under MacOS X on PowerPC, not System 7 on a 680x0-family chip.
And if, by some incredibly unlikely turn of events, a Macintosh 680x0-executable System-7 deployable email virus were to suddenly make an appearance, and furthermore, exhibited a level of destructiveness kin to that exhibited by PC viruses, you just throw away your entire Macintosh environment (the virtual hard drive is just a disk image file, as small as a couple hundred MB) and reinstall your MacOS and apps – your PC environment would most likely be unaffected (and even more likely, uninfected, as the Mac code would not be executable outside of the emulator).
No more updating virus definitions, no more trepidation about attachments (is it really something Sue is sending me or does Sue have a virus, or a virus is spoofing her email addy?), no more worries.