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Protect your email – and your friends too 

Here is a simple computer trick I learned that is really worth knowing.

As you probably know, when a worm virus gets into your computer, it is programmed to head straight for your email address book and sends itself to everyone 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 is what you do:

First, open your address book and click on ‘New Contact’, just as if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses. In the window where you would type in your friend’s first name, just type in ‘A’.

For the screen name or email address, type in AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA

Now, here’s what you have 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 starts in an effort to spread to all your friends.

When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony 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 a notification that an email to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA cannot 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 never worry about opening mail from friends.

DO IT NOW and pass this on to all your friends!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.