Protect Your Email Address Book
Got this from a non-technical email list I'm on.
How to protect your e-mail address bookA computer repairman says this is like
having gold.This is a good thing.
I learned a computer trick today that's
really ingenious in its simplicity.
As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets
into your computer
it heads straight for your email address
book,
and sends itself to everyone in there,
thus infecting all your friends and
associates.This trick won't keep the virus from getting
into your computer, but it will stop it from
using your address book
to spread further, and it will alert you to
the fact that the worm has
gotten into your system.Here's what you do:First, open your address book and click on
'new contact,'
just as you would do if you were adding
a new friend to your list of email
addresses.In the window where you would type your
friend's first name, type in 'A'.
For the screen name or email address,
type AAAAAAA@AAA.AAANow, here's what you've done and why it
works:The 'name 'A' will be placed at the top of
your address book
as entry #1.
This will be where the worm will start
in an effort to send itself to all your
friends.
When it tries to send itself to
AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA,
it will be undeliverable
because of the phony email address you
entered.If the first attempt fails
(which it will because of the phony
address),
the worm goes no further
and your friends will not be infected.Here's the second great advantage of this
method:If an email cannot be delivered,
you will be notified of this in your In Box
almost immediately.
Hence,
if you ever get an email telling you that
an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA could not be delivered,
you know right away that you have the worm
virus
in your system.You can then take steps to get rid of it!Pretty slick huh?If everybody you know does this
then you need not ever worry about opening
mail from friends.DO IT NOW and pass this on to all your
friends.
Not a bad idea. However, it will NOT protect you from email worms, nor will it
prevent worms from using you to propogate. Only very stupid worms
try to send to everyone in one go -- you get a much higher chance of
success if you try each address individually, and if you try them in
random order. And only very stupid worms give up after the first
failure.
While there are a large number of stupid worms out there, you can't
depend on worms being stupid. Besides, all the of the very stupid
worms should be caught by your anti-virus.
The ONLY thing this will do is let you know you have a problem -- and
for that reason alone it is worth doing.
...well that and continuing to encourage users to not just blindly
click on anything and everything that gets sent to them in email,
and encouraging users to run and keep up-to-date virus protection,
and to keep up-to-date with all Windows and Office updates -- but
honestly if that approach worked we wouldn't have this problem.