Putting #s and AAA addresses in OE

Johanna · 2004/04/29

Recently, I have gotten a number of emails advising me to make a fake email address for the start of my address book, like 111@myisp.net to "fool" the viruses that attack OE's address book.

This is a futile effort, and anyone receiving one of those emails is encouraged to delete it promptly. From Snopes to save me the typing.

Viruses don't send out mail interactively, as people do. Most mail programs include routines to check addresses for valid formatting as the user adds them to the message header form, and those routines prevent the user from proceeding when a badly-formatted address is detected Ã¢â‚¬" the problem must be corrected before more addresses can be added or the message sent. But viruses aren't using interactive forms to address messages; they're running in the background, creating and sending messages programmatically rather than interactively, so they never encounter the forms (and the address-checking routines attached to them) intended for humans.
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Most viruses don't attempt to mail themselves to every entry in an infected system's address book, all in one message. They sometimes go through address books sequentially and mail out separate messages to each address encountered, a case in which the phony address at the head of the address book won't do anything to stop the virus from spreading. (The badly-addressed message will bounce, but that won't do anything to prevent the virus from proceeding through the rest of the address book.) Moreover, most viruses go through address books randomly (rather than sequentially) or pick up addresses from a variety of other files resident on infected systems (e.g., read mail messages, HTML files), approaches on which the method advocated above will have no effect whatsoever.
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Even viruses whose spread has been halted via the ruse of a fake address book entry can still be doing damage to the infected user's system. Once an executable file has been opened and run, any virus it contains begins doing its dirty work. Part of that dirty work may amount to mailing itself to others, but if the virus is programmed to do more than just replicate itself via e-mail, it will still be quietly wreaking havoc on the infected computer. Deleting the infection-carrying e-mail will not halt whatever else may be underway.
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Okay, off my soapbox, now.
Johanna

Johanna

RayH · 2004/04/30

The thing to do is to add an entry for a second e-mail box. When you see e-mail coming from yourself that you didn't send, you know something is up.

I use dual e-mail boxes to send myself stuff all the time from public computers, etc or just to test something.

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Putting #s and AAA addresses in OE

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Putting #s and AAA addresses in OE

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