This is a plea to everyone who reads this. If you have my email address in your address book and I do not know you please remove it. You can always contact me through the links here.
Time for a bit of basic education:
Never, ever, ever, ever...
EVER open an attachment in an email unless you specifically requested it and are expecting it!!!!! People who are too inquisitive are 99% likely to infest their system with a virus/worm. The latest one is particularly nasty because it not only emails itself to your entire address book but also attaches a randomly selected file from your personal private directories.
The attachments are several hundred kb in size and can rapidly cause your email service to shut you down as your mailbox becomes overloaded. Additionally the the virus will eventually delete your hard drive and may even cause irrepearable damage to your motherboard.
Anyone who has this virus and does not bother with virus protection software or is too lazy to be bothered will eventually suffer the consequences as their hard drive self destructs. At least we will be spared any more contamination from them until they reconfigure their drives and get back on line.
Personally I cannot be infected by these virus/worms as I use the MacOS, but, because I receive so many emails every day and now the numbers are doubling with infected emails from people who I have never even heard of but who, for some obscure reason, have my address in their address book. Because someone ignorantly sent a mass mailing including my address and didn't use the
BCC field instead of the
To or
CC my address, and probably yours if you have ever received emails with long lists of recipients, is now in thousands of address books and many of those will be infected and are sending me large attachments and so clogging up your and my system.
I suggest to anyone who is receiving these emails to log into
Mail2Web before they launch their email program and delete any emails that are more than about 100kb in size from their accounts. When they log in using their normal email software the infected mails won't be there and thus reduce the risk of inadvertantly opening an infected file.
Please remember.... NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER open an attachment of any kind unless you specifically requested it and are expecting it. If you are the kind of person who for some unfathomable reason likes to send attachments of any kind with your email, tough! Get into the habit of asking someone first if they would like to receive whatever you have to send. This way we will eventually beat thsi particularly nasty virus.
[ 24 July 2001: Message edited by: Capt PPRuNe ]