Protect your PC part 2

Forwarded Email Messages

There are some very funny, cute or shocking emails passed across the Internet everyday.

There are also some very dangerous viruses passed across the Internet everyday.

A lot of the time they are linked together.

Forwarded email, third time



Details:

Any email whose subject line starts with FW: has been forwarded to you. Therefore the person who sent it is NOT the original writer.

Who is the original writer? Sometimes is it very hard to tell.

Most forwarded emails have been passed around many, many times. (See Figure 1) These are the "headers" usually included with any forwarded email. The headers are a list of people who have received this email at some point.

The more header paragraphs you see, the more times this email has changed hands.

"You don't know where it has been!"

The more times an email has changed hands, the higher the chance that it has picked up a virus.

I would be VERY CAREFUL about opening a forwarded email attachment. Its virus potential is VERY HIGH.

My recommendation? Delete it. Right Now.
I know, it is probably hilarious
I know, it is from a trusted friend
I know, it is eating you alive NOT to open it.

Delete it anyway. Do it now. Save yourself the pain and agony. It is time to turn over a new leaf called internet safety.

Why have I added this topic to my blog? Because I constantly have broken PC's brought to me for repair that have been beaten to a pulp by the latest virus. Depending on how bad the virus is, it could take 2 or 3 hours to clean.

I am happy to earn that money, but are you happy to spend it or be without your PC for the time needed to clean it?

But Stuart, I have virus protection.

Is it up to date? (How do I do that?)
Has your subscription expired? (Wow, I don't know)
Do you trust your personal or business information to the virus protection people? (Hmmmm...)


But Stuart, This is how I keep in touch with my neighbors, family, and friends.

Well, I wonder if your close contacts would rather read/hear something that YOU wrote? Something that came directly from you? It is much easier to "pass it on" than to actually think or come up with material to send, and it may not be flashy or funny, but it will have actual value that becomes more valuable as time goes by.

Hotmail options to mark as junk or phishing scam

A couple of things you can do to reduce the amount of spam and/or forwarded emails in your inbox is to:

• Ask your friends/relatives to stop sending them.
• Don't forward any of these on to someone else, eventually they will stop sending them to you.
• Mark them as junk/spam in your email program (see example from hotmail above). This will alert the email server that you don't want to receive these anymore. The more diligent you are, the less "junk" messages you will get.
• Remember that everyone of these message is a potential virus carrier.

Epilogue:

If you choose to ignore this advice and choose to open a forwarded email and its attachment and then send it on to all your friends, please be kind and (after clicking [Forward]) delete all the headers that sometimes are longer than the original message.