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How To Protect Your Address Book!

1962 Views 7 Replies 3 Participants Last post by  Pseudocyber
Has anyone tried this? Does it work? Here's the message I got from someone.

I learned a computer trick today 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 "[email protected]".

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.

But, when it tries to send itself to [email protected], 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 your friends will not 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 e mail addressed to [email protected] 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!
Many thanks for the input.

ljCharlie
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old trick doesnt work....

cant tell you how many viruses (love letter for instance) actully was tying up modems because people had fax contacts only and it tried to "fax" the virus ....the worm/virus (specially todays) dont care if the adress is flawed or not it will sent it to random, half or all the adress in you adress book

best protection
UPDATES of the OS
good updates AV
a firewall
and a little smarts....in some cases ...alot of smates:winkgrin:
Thanks for the response. I would assumed that the virus would send to all of the addresses in the list regardless of if the email is valid or not.

I just wanted other people's opinion on this suggestion that's all.

Again, thanks!

ljCharlie
Actually, the BEST way, is NOT to use Outlook. Of course, that's too much of an inconvenience to most of the Assimilated Borg (I mean Microsoft) users.
welcome the borg...use the borg...love the borg

Pseudocyber we are tracking u

:trnsfrm: :trnsfrm: :xbones: :beamup:
We have been assimilated. We use Outlook and Microsoft Office. We are Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be .. assim ... .. NO! There are other options - other email clients and contact managers! Join the resista ... ... Resistance is futile. We are Borg. You will be AssiM$ilated. All other competing email programs best features will be Assimilated and remainder destroyed. We are Bill.

:D
see that didnt take long to turn you around...:winkgrin:



wasnt there a question about a copmuter issue here??
The question was could you protect your Outlook addressbook by simply using wrong email addresses. No, not really. It will keep you from spreading the virus, but your computer will still be pounding away, trying to send emails to bogus addresses - and they'll bounce back and fill up your inbox.
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