The World of Computing and Solutions

Question: recently I was sent an email from a contact of mine describing a trick to protect your address book from misuse by viruses. it says to add a new contact with the email address: aaaaa@aaa.aaa; it claims that a virus trying to send itself to everyone in your address book would start with this one, since it’s alphabetically first. Because the address is invalid, the attempt would fail and the virus would quit. Also, you’d get a delivery-failure warning, which would alert you to the attempt. Is this true?

Answer: There’s so many of these “so called tricks”, unfortunately, your contact is wrong. If an e-mail virus is running on your computer, it will send itself to all or some of the people in your address book. Some even search documents on your system to harvest the email addresses. The virus doesn’t care whether the addresses are valid or not, it just blasts out to them regardless and ignores any responses.

the “trick” also claims that you will be alerted to the attempt by the deliver-failure message. That’s wrong too. It would be stupid for the virus creators to allow that. Its function is to remain on your system and infect other systems without your knowledge.

Every address book contains a few invalid email addresses. the virus “spoofs” the return addresses, directing any nondelivery notices to an address chosen at random from those it collected.

Don’t throw away your anti-virus program in favor of this quick, but very useless fix.