In article ,
Dana wrote:
So what does it do?
All I could see was an attachment, which I assumed was a virus so I didn't
download it.

There was no attachment. When Outlook Express sees a line that looks
like this (except I'll change spaces to underscores so as to not trigger
this for you):

begin__something_more_stuff

it *guesses* that it is the start of a uuencoded attachment of a file
named "something", and tries to interpret the rest of the file, down to
whatever the marker is that marks the end of uuencoded attachments (I
forget what that is), as the attachment.

So, basically, if an email message or usenet post contains a line that
starts with the word "begin" followed by two spaces, OE will tell you
there is an attachment.

Microsoft knows about this, and they even have a Knowledgebase article
discussing it, which offers the wonderful advice that you should ask
people not to start lines with "begin ". It took them longer to write
that article than it would have taken any programmer who has advanced
past the beginner stage to make the uuencode detection more robust and
fix this problem. They should just fix this stupid bug.

--
--Tim Smith