richard64

Hoenstly, this was the funniest read I have had in a long while!

The first thing to note is that the post talks about OE using .mbx files. Well, in XP OE uses .dbx files so how many years out of date does it make the post? It looks like it was written for Win95, so that makes the post over a decade old! In Vista, Windows Mail uses .eml files which are text files, and you can use notepad to read them!

The .mbx and .dbx files are not encrypted, you can use any hex file viewer to see what's in them. There's nothing secret in them, or about them. They are just a database. They are a bloody pain because Microsoft's code to read and write them is buggy, and you may lose some of your emails when OE bugs trashes the files, but you really have to be paranoid to think that there is anything sinister about them.

The stuff about /s files is just plain silly, it cannot be secret if there is a tool in Windows to remove that attribute! LOL! The same is true about desktop.ini - the only reason for this is to allow Windows Explorer to treat a folder differently to normal, so that a folder with photos will be shown with previews rather than as a collection of files. Again, there is nothing to stop you from deleting the desktop.ini files (I do it quite often because I am an old fart and don't like all this eye candy).

As for the stuff about the IE cache, that is just plain dangerous. All browsers have caches, so to say that you can prevent your history being saved by switching browser is totally wrong and gives people a false sense of security. IE is no different to other browsers in this respect. With all browsers you must regularly clear your cache. (It is a good thing to do this because the cache takes up space and clearing the cache frees up disk space.)

So use Mozilla, or Opera because they work better than IE, don't use them because you think that they don't have a cache, because they do.

Richard