How to protect your e-mail address book


Alastair says this is like having gold. This is a very good thing; a computer trick 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 AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA




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 AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, 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 AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA 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.

every worm is different depending how the programmer wrote it. I reckon most would send out to the entire contact list as a bulk message. If they did indeed make it go one at a time, i can't see a reason for it to stop after one not working.

A better way would be to make sure you have up to date AV and up to date windows updates

True, but at least the returned email would give you some kind of warning if it slipped through!

also facebook and msn are becoming very common means for virus distribution, even boost cruising is lately haha. Java is a bad thing if you arent aware of what it can do, never click 'install' or 'allow' on anything that you arent sure about!



yeah that is a good point actually

but having said that, i could send an email from you if i knew your email address to anyone I felt like without logging in to your email account. Email headers are pretty simple to edit via the command prompt and most email hosts don't use any form of verification. that's a separate issue though

Most virus.worms etc these days will pick a random address for both the to and from field. Which is why people sometimes get undeliverable notices for emails they never sent.

Doing that ^^^^ wont really do shit sorry!

hmm so every hacker just read this and reprogramed there software lol

right... this wont actually do anything.

I woudn't bother with it.

who actually uses the windows address book any way.