X-message-flag: Question of ethics?!

[Guest]

I recently have been receiving e-mails from one of our local ISPs. When I
open the e-mail using Outlook, I receive the following message above the
header info:
"Warning! Use of Microsoft Outlook renders your system susceptible to
Internet worms." As I look into the reasoning behind this, I find the
following in the header: "X-message-flag: Warning! Use of Microsoft Outlook
renders your system susceptible to Internet worms."

His nice little message has caused much confusion and questions from my
customers, and I am somewhat annoyed by his agressiveness against Outlook.
Is there any way administratively for me to block the "X-message-flag"
feature on customer computers so they don't see his propaganda and get
confused?

In researching the issue, I found handfuls of UNIX websites where the users
are giggling with school-girlish glee sharing other ways to "break" the
fucntionality of those "unenlightened" folks using Microsoft Mail clients.

I find it sad that such a neat little feature made to make administrator and
user lifes easier and happier - with no ill effect, is being used by childish
anti-everything-except-what-I-believe people who like to giggle at their own
superiority (are these the same guys and gals that shoot road signs?!)

Anyway - is there anyway to block this for the folks who don't want to see
it (me for instance)?

Thanks,
Skitrees

 

[F.H. Muffman]

Anyway - is there anyway to block this for the folks who don't want
to see it (me for instance)?

I'm not aware of anything on the client side, but an event sink on an
exchange server could always be written to strip that header out of mails,
but I don't think there's anything built in to the Exchange side either.
You might want to ping the Exchange newsgroups (if you're running an
Exchange server), otherwise, well, you might just have to live with it.
Children will be children, after all.