The best AV solution I can think of is for all possible holes and exploits in Microsoft mail clients to be exploited as soon as possible, and as violently as possible. Maybe if that happens fewer people will run stupid Microsoft mail clients, and the whole issue will just go away.
Users don't care. They will run a PC infested with viruses until it becomes unusable. When it becomes unusable, they will just put the factory recovery CD back into it and start again with old versions of the software that got them into trouble in the first place. Let's not pretend that pine is any more secure (yes, the very email client I'm using now). "SECURITY NOTE: The pine software has had several remote vulnerabilities discovered in the past, which allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary code as you on your local system, by the action of sending a specially-prepared email. All such KNOWN problems have been fixed, but the pine code is written in a very insecure style and the FreeBSD Security Officer believes there are likely to be other undiscovered vulnerabilities. Do you wish to proceed with the installation of pine anyway?" source: /usr/ports/mail/pine4/pkg-install - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog