I did get the snow white virus on both Home and office computers last week
complementary of this list.
A bit of clarification may be in order here. The various autox.team.net lists
do not in themselves allow the propagation of attachments, such as a virus.
You may, however, get a message from an address you recognize as a list
contributor which could contain something nasty.
The mechanism is that someone, who for whatever reasons thinks that Microsoft
garbage like Outlook Express should actually be used on a real network. One
"feature" of this virus magnet is the ability to automatically add any email
addresses from messages into your address book. By default, this "feature"
is turned on. So every person who posts to a list where there are subscribers
using this Outlook junk gets added into their address book. And virus
writers make use of this to email the virus to every adddress they can find
in the infected person's address list. So when this list subscriber gets
infected, you are automatically a made a target, and the chumps who use
Outlook have no idea what they are doing to you.
Another mechanism that may cause you to think that a virus was sent through
the list is simple forgery. One of the methods used by mail programs is to
check for valid return addresses on mail before sending it on. Trouble is
that it is fairly easy to spoof this, and unscrupulous folks will put an
address they know is valid in their mail so it passes this simple test. And
since there are tens of thousands of people who know about the various team.net
lists, sometimes one of the list addresses gets used. Or sometimes the virus
may be sent to you and the list is copied, so you'll see the list address in
your copy, even though the message doesn't get sent on to the list.
So I suggest that if you use an operating system that is susceptible to
viruses [Anything written by Microsoft] that you be careful. If you are
using Outlook for your mail, I strongly suggest you turn off the default
behavior of adding addresses to the address book. I think this is in the
Tools -> Options menu, I may have to run the program and check. You may also
want to turn off the default of including the *entire* message to which you
are replying in your replies. Some of you are on lists which include the
'Edit your replies' death trailer, chances are you'll see more of that in
the future. Too bad common courtesy and intelligence aren't growing at the
same rate as email usage. Sigh.
For those of you running Miscrosoft based systems, you may want to consider
using non-Microsoft mail programs, which can reduce your virus exposure
somewhat. Check out Eudora, www.eudora.com, or Pegasus mail, www.pmail.com.
I've blathered on long enough for now.
mjb.
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