[Sca-cooks] OT mail question

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Phlip:

>The reason is that a lot of these worms and
>viruses have learned to imitate addresses in the infected person's mailbox,
>so if, say, I were infected, my machine might send you a message with an
>attachment, but might have Adamantius' return address on it. You'd open the
>attachment, thinking he was sending you some information, and the nasty
>would infect your machine.
>
>Once you understand how these things work, you can pretty well spot them and
>delete them before they cause a problem, but as a general rule, if you get
>an attachment, don't open it until you're sure you know who sent it. As an
>example, Adamantius teases me when he sends me stuff, but his teasing also
>serves the purpose of letting me know it's from him and not from some
>infected computer.

It's true: the degree of obnoxiousness I sometimes attain requires a 
certain amount of creativity, and is very hard to imitate, let alone 
automate. It probably also helps to know that some of us on this list 
(myself, The Artist Formerly Known As Anahita, I think, and a couple 
of others) use Macintoshes, and some of the files that viruses send 
to the mailboxes of the unsuspecting have extensions that are more or 
less completely alien to the Mac OS's. For example, if you get an 
.exe file from any of us, the astronomically extreme likelihood is 
that it is not, in fact, from the person named.

I admit to being incredibly stupid and reckless about this stuff 
myself, because, as per the February issue of Consumer Reports, there 
were 69 known viruses, Trojan Horses, etc., that _would_ affect my OS 
-- had they not already been identified and and weeded out in the 
latest security update, versus some 69,000 out there for Windows. 
Sometimes I try to open them for fun...

Adamantius (whose machine last got a virus in 1986, via floppy disk)
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04