To stop email spreading virus's.. is this a valid solution?

[sekser]

Got this email asking me if there is any validity to this... Has anyone tried this?


here's the copy and paste of the email.


Trick your address book!

Who among us doesn't know someone who has experienced the embarrassment of unknowingly spreading a computer virus via their email address book? It's time to STOP this from happening by TAKING CONTROL of your email program! For those who are unaware, many computer viruses spread themselves by sending themselves to everyone in your address book. Imagine how you would feel if you were unknowingly infected with a computer virus, and worse yet, your friends, family, and business contacts were being targeted by your computer! Well, if you want to avoid this sort of thing, here's a great tip.

This tip won't prevent YOU from getting any viruses (you have to scan those attachments yourself before opening them to do that), but it will stop those viruses from latching onto your address book and sending itself out to others.

To avoid spreading computer viruses, create a contact in your email address book with the name : !0000 with no email address in the details.

This contact will then show up as your first contact. If a virus attempts to do a "send all" on your contact list, your pc will put up an error message saying that: "The Message could not be sent. One or more recipients do not have an e-mail address. Please check your Address Book and make sure all the recipients have a valid e-mail address."

You click on OK and the offending (virus) message would not have been sent to anyone. Of course no changes have been made to your original contacts list. The offending (virus) message may then be automatically stored in your "Drafts" or "Outbox" folder. Go in there and delete the offending message. Problem is solved and virus is not spread.

Try this and pass on to your email contacts. The more people that use this technique, the less vulnerable we will be to viruses that spread in this manner!

 

[PCUser]

This is really good information and excellent to pass on to others. We use a similar method at work to protect.

 

[corkyg]

It can be set up, but it won't work. Woody's site has an article on this scheme . . . which sounds good but won't stop the virus or worm such as Nimda: (Here's the clip

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VIRUS BLOCKING !0000 TRICK DOESN'T WORK
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Several of you forwarded this interesting trick for short-circuiting viruses, which appears to be floating around the Internet (thanks to RS for being the first!):

"To avoid spreading computer viruses, create a contact in your email address book with the name : 0000 with no email address in the details. This contact will then show up as your first contact. If a virus attempts to do a "send all" on your contact list, your pc will put up an error message saying that: "The Message could not be sent. One or more recipients do not have an e-mail address. Please check your Address Book and make sure all the recipients have a valid e-mail address." You click on OK and the offending (virus) message would not have been sent to anyone. Of course no changes have been made to your original contacts list. The offending (virus) message may then be automatically stored in your "Drafts" or "Outbox" folder. Go in there and delete the offending message. Problem is solved and virus is not spread."

That sounded like an interesting approach, so I asked Dr. Vesselin Bontchev - frequent WOW contributor and my favorite no-nonsense anti-virus guru - about it. Guess what? The trick doesn't work.

The infected message won't be sent to the *first* contact (because it has no e-mail address) - but it will be sent to every other contact (with a valid e-mail address, that is). Sure, you'll get a warning that something fishy is going on. Sure, you can turn your computer off when you see the warning - this will prevent the mail blast. But how many users will be that smart and how many will just click on the OK button? Not to mention that some e-mail viruses send themselves to addresses randomly selected from the address book, that some do not use the address book at all but simply reply to all messages in your Inbox, that some (e.g., SirCam) do not use Outlook at all and have their own SMTP mailer and collect e-mail addresses from the Net traffic instead of looking in the address book, etc., etc.
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