[oceanview]

some of these viruses are hidden in ZIP file attachments. what's broken, Outlook or WINZIP?

[HairOfTheDog]

Neither are broken. If the user runs a program, what would you like a computer to do? (Hint: You want it to run the program) Email viruses are user-activated programs.

Winzip did what it was supposed to do, it shrank the program down in size. But you still had to activate it.

[-YYZ-]

I noticed that, too. Putting the executable in a .zip attachment would seem to make it even less likely to get executed, but then again judging by the volume of the crap, apparently a lot of people are dumb enough to open the zip file in the attachment and then run the zipped executable.

These email "viruses" are a pain, but they're also quite "dumb" in that they require the user to run the executable. By now, anyone dumb enough to open an attachment they know nothing about deserves pretty much whatever they get.