Nasty Spam

I have two (maybe three) spam filters, but I don't really trust them. I am on several mailing lists to which I am rather attached, but the filters say, 'Oh, this e-mail was sent to lots of people: it must be spam.' So I set the filters not to delete anything before I've reviewed it.

I saw, caught by one filter, an e-mail that said, 'An e-postcard from a friend.' I get quite a few e-postcards from friends, and some of these friends send them out to everyone on their e-mail list, so I thought the spam filter was mistaken, as it so often is. Some of these e-postcards are quite amusing, and, even if it's a boring holiday greeting card, I like to respond with a note of thanks.

In short, I opened the e-mail, and my anti-virus went wild. The e-postcard was a virus. And there are some viruses that do not require that the recipient do anything really stupid, like clicking 'This program might be a virus, do you really want to run it?'

As soon as I saw what it was, I clicked 'Stop Download,' and (I'm 99% sure) I managed to stop it: a virus scan showed no infection. Some viruses are smart enough to disable anti-virus software, and some are so new that anti-virus software that hasn't recently been updated can miss them, but (I hope) my anti-virus was up to date, plus I clicked 'Stop Download' before a working form of the virus could be downloaded (I use dialup, so even the simplest programs take a long time to download).

To summarize, it is now necessary to be very careful with e-postcards. Needless to say, if the e-postcard demands that the recipient run a program, it is suicidal to run the program, but this one seemed ready to run itself.

So, again, please be careful.