Daniel said:
This may not be the arena for this question but here goes. At my web
email I receive several 150K messages a day from 'Microsoft' urging
me to use this patch or download something. I never do any of it but
it clogs my email after a couple of days. Is there anything I can do
besides get a new email address? Are these things actually from MS?
I use the yahoo spamguard but my box still fills up after 2-3 days.
No, they are not from Microsoft -- Microsoft *never* sends updates by
e-mail. They are the work of a nasty virus called "Swen" (or one of its
cousins), which would like nothing better than to have you run one of
those attachments and infect your PC, like the user whose infected PC
sent you that message. The virus harvests e-mail addresses from
mailboxes, newsgroup folders, and cached web pages on the infected PC,
and even goes out to the newsgroups to download messages from which to
get more e-mail addresses, all so that it can send itself out to as many
addresses as possible. Note that the user who *appears* to have sent
you an infected message is never the one who really did so -- the virus
forges the sender's address, too.
Unfortunately, if you've posted your e-mail address in some public place
on the 'net, you're probably going to continue to be swamped for quite
some time, even after you've removed it from anywhere you can. Your
best protection is to fake or "anti-spam" your e-mail address whenever
you send to a public forum, but that won't do much good once the cat's
out of the bag.
See your antivirus vendor for more information about Swen and its ilk,
or just go here:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/[email protected]