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E-Mail Safety Rules
 

an article by Murray Todd Williams

My mother has a friend who must love e-mail because she's always passing various things on to my mom. Usually it's warnings about crazed people harvesting kidneys or warnings about killer computer viruses from AOL that will delete your hard disk if you even read them, etc. Mom's savvy enough not to indiscriminately pass these things along to everyone she knows, but instead she forwards them to me—her personal computer consultant—with a note like "is this legit?"

Without exception I type a couple choice keywords into Google, find a site that debunks hoaxes and give her a URL to a page describing that particular hoax. After the millionth such e-mail I finally got tired and decided it was time to address Mom's friend directly. This time she had passed along the following to my Mom:

Subject: HOW TO PROTECT YOUR ADDRESS BOOK

I learned a computer trick today that's really ingenious in it's simplicity. Just received it from a friend.

As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your e-mail 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 e-mail addresses.

In the window where you would type your friend's first name, type in AAAAAAA... Also use address AAAAAAA@a.aaa

Now, here's what you've done and why it works: The name AAAAAAA 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. But, when it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA, It will be undeliverable because of the phony e-mail address you entered.

If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not be infected.

Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an e-mail cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an e-mail telling you that an e-mail addressed to AAAAAAA 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. Pass this on to all you friends.

Instead of writing a simple note saying "No, in fact that's pretty stupid and not likely to work." I decided to actually write a set of rules that the lay-person should be able to read, understand and follow which would probably do more good than all the Anti Virus software companies combined if only people of the world would take the time to read them. The following is the response that I'd send to Mom, her friend, and all the e-mail addresses I was able to pull out of the dozen headers from that e-mail:

So that's everything. Some day when I have time I'll unwrap this "story within a story" and just write it as an article, although I think the exposition of where this all came from illustrates some good points. By the way, as copyright holder of this article, I give everyone permission to take it, copy it, repost it, send it to loved ones, etc. As I said before, if people adhered to these simple rules there would be much fewer computer viruses out there. Now if only Microsoft can clean up their products to the rest of the worms out there couldn't propagate.

 

  
 

written materials and original images copyright © 2003 by Murray Todd Williams

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