Actually the best way to protect against viruses is to run something
besides Microsoft Windows on your computer. But the marketing thugs at
Microsoft have the hook set so deep it is unlikely that is going to happen.
For those of you willing to think that dealing with virus infection is a
normal part of using a computer, you can try out the free AVG virus scanner,
available from http://www.grisoft.com - it is what we use on Windows boxes
up at my day job. It is as good as, if not better than, the commercial
packages like Norton, and it is free. They do offer more powerful programs
that do cost money, but the free one is sufficient for personal use.
And if you are running Outlook instead of some decent mailing program, I'll
suggest a few things. Change your settings to:
- turn off preview window, which allows you to get infected without any
action on your part.
- set your messages to be sent in plain text
- turn off the automatic inclusion of addresses into your address book.
- turn off the automatic inclusion of the entire original message in your
reply
Basically what happens is that many of the current virus programs use the
Outlook address book for automatic propagation of themselves to other boxes.
Which means that if you've ever sent a message to a mailing list where at
least one subscriber uses Outlook with the default setting of adding addresses
to the address book, you'll be a target. These addresses you so handily
provide for the virus serve as guides to set the message 'From' and 'To'
fields for the outgoing message. Most decent mail transport systems will
reject an email if it comes in from a bogus address, so a virus slaps on an
address it finds in your address book. Also know that what you see as the
'From' and 'To' fields in your mail reader may or may not have anything to
do with where the mail actually originated or was sent. Those entries are
only for the presentation to the user, they are not part of the actual
envelope addresses used to send the message. You may get a message from
joe_student@diploma.mill.edu, when Joe has actually been on vacation in
Borneo for a month, and his computer has been turned off since he sent the
list his goodbye message.
And you may even see a message that claims to be from one of the Team.Net
lists, though the filtering done here on the server doesn't allow that to
happen. If a mailing list name is in someone's Outlook address book, it
can be one of the addresses picked at random on the outgoing virus.
mjb.
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