Actually, listening to your email over the TTS reader is a whole lot safer than opening your email from a client such as Outlook. We mark the message read but we don't actually "open" it or access any of the attachments. None of the built in formatting stuff (in the case where they allow rich text formatting) applies. We extract the text portion of the body and run it through the TTS engine. Attachments are noted but not accessed or manipulated.
I'd be hard pressed to come up with a scheme where a virus could be unleashed by just pulling the text out of the body of an email.
If you choose to fax your email to yourself, the email is forwarded to the fax gatway which then DOES open the attachments it can render (i.e. .TXT, .TIF and .BMP attachments) but by default it wont open any other attachments. I've never heard of any viruses traveling in those types of attachments but I suppose it could "spoof" a document type or something. Either way, the fax server will never 'execute' an attacment such as a VBS or EXE file. If they're worried about it they can just not allow faxing of emails.
In short, it's a pretty safe procedure.
Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg
