~Email-User
RE: Protect your e-mail address book
You may have already done this - but just in case .
How to protect your e-mail address book
A 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
Now, 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 , 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 none of your friends will 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 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.
Dear Email-User,
Neat trick however it will not stop a modern worm or virus. It may stop a very poorly written piece of malware, the problem is most malware written with the intent of going after your mailing list to spread spam will be smart enough to recognize an invalid email. Even if it did not validate an email address before sending, they usually have their own mailer engine that will use anybody else email address as a sender to avoid detection.
FYI: Anybody that has any experience in email knows that there will be some invalid addresses in an address book (outdated contacts, etc.), so hitting an invalid or outdated address will not cause malware to just 'give up' on the first problem it may encounter.
Actually some worms or viruses not only just send email out, they collect addresses to send to their host (not via email) for further processing, so even if you blocked all email sending access, the address book would still be compromised. A good up to date anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall or full security suite with the previous mentioned features is still the best defense.
An ounce of prevention... (you know the rest)
NetWarden
PS -> Actually the information in the above message you sent me would also create a false sense of security, people thinking that they have some sort of protection by doing this when really they still have none. Also it sounds like good advice (however not) so it will get forwarded by many thinking this is a good thing to tell others, of course in doing so they are feeding the spam machine.
See: http://www.netwarden.net/TikiWiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=11
You however did the right thing and questioned the message and did not just forward it to everyone. Even if you were going to forwarded it to people, you would use the 'BCC' and not the 'TO' or 'CC'.
;)
