AAA email addrees to stop virus/trojan?

[Briab Guy]

Has anyone herd the theory that if you make the first email address in your address bok, AAA, and put an unreal address to it, trojans/virus's will not be able to use your address book to send out mail?
Or something like that?

Thanks

[Statica]

Nope; most virii dont come with email checks etc - they will send out a copy of itself to AAA as well.

[Larry E.]

Just make the first entry in your address book to yourself then you will be the first to know.

[oldbe]

Like Larry E. answer, altho will you be the first to know?! Are not emails sent one after the other?

[old dog]

Depending on the virus, e-mail will be sent anyway. However if you have the bogus Addy first in line it will get returned to you. Alerting you to the fact that something is sending mail with out your knowledge, because you will never use that address.
old dog

[BlueKrystal22]

Hmm... I may not be so anti-address book after reading this. Once you know you have a virus sending itself to your list, you can notify them immediately to stop it from spreading. Never thought of that - thanks, Larry!

Hint: For your mailbox options, make sure there's a column that shows you the size of the email. A normal email with no attachments should be no larger than 3 or 4 K. If you see something that you don't recognize that is around 100K with no attachment, it is most likely a virus.

~K

[oldbe]

BlueKrystal22
Thanks for the tip, would not have thought of that. Easy to setup.

John

[reboot]

Or stop using Outhouse Express for email, and get a real email client, then you don't have to worry about sending anything to anyone you don't want to.

[Briab Guy]

rebot, which one would you recomend?

[glc]

I recommend Pegasus - I've been using it for about 8 years now. Eudora is also excellent if you disable the M$ viewer. If you do switch, make sure to get rid of your Windows address book or you have accomplished nothing.

[Briab Guy]

If I can pick your brain,
Why is Pegasus better then outlook / exp ?
I had mostly thought that it was the O/S that was leaving things more open then the typ of mail client you use.
I am not disagreeing with you, just trying to learn .

[skeg]

I have heard this but it doesn't work as it still gets sent to all other addresses

skeg

nice idea though

[reboot]

Pegasus or Eudora, either lite or Pro.
Simply turn off "Use MS Viewer", and it's done.
Your computer will no longer automatically run any attachment, even if VBS is installed, and it won't automatically send anything either, because it uses a completely different type of address book, that the trojan cannot read.
It's not the OS, it's Outhouse Express. OE (no matter what version) attempts to do something with every attachment. If it's got the right sort of suffix, you're infected. Period. Unless you update and run the virus scanner, and have email filtering on <i>before</i> you download any email every day.
Even then, you can get infected, if the trojan/virus is new enough to NOT be included in the latest A-V definition.
Once infected, (most) trojan payloads read the address book, then propogate by sending themselves to everyone in the book, and at the same time spoofing the senders address as someone else in the address book.
Pegasus and Eudora don't allow this at all, and all attachments show up as attachments, in a folder, simply deleted.
Eudora light is probably best for single user, Pegasus next, although it's much better for LAN/WAN as well as POP mail. Eudora pro, even with it's free version ads, is still a superb email client.
Not sure about Pegasus, but in Eudora, you can even turn off any html stuff, and send/recieve email in plain ascii text, so even if someone sends you an email with "stationary" (fancy background/fonts/colors) it will show up as plain text, and all the extras will show up as attachments.
Become part of the solution instead of the problem, and uninstall OE.
For those of you who use OE for newsgroups (usenet), just get a 3rd party reader. There are a number of good free ones, well worth the download.

[Psychodic_Greak]

I did the same thing with AOL, Id open every e-mail, and before i signed off, i told all my friends DONT accept any e-mails from my account til morning or afternoon, when ever i time im signing off.