As you may know, when or if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates.

This trick won't keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has gotten into your system.

Here's what you do:


First, open your address book and click on 'new contact,' just as you would do if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses In the window where you would type your friend's first name, type in 'A'

For the screen name or email address, type AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA

Now, here's what you've done and why it works: The 'name 'A' will be placed at the top of your address book as entry 1.


This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends. When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the fake email address you entered. If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the fake address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not be infected.

Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!

Pretty good?
If everybody you know does this then you need not ever worry about opening mail from friends.

Excellent, thanks Floss, I'm on the case.

B-lowKiss

Although I know that this sort of post is made in good faith, it is in fact a hoax. What is always a good idea when you read something like this, is to post a portion of the text in to a Google search.

e.g. AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA

If you get an exciting tip through email, check it out with a Google search first. In the vast majority of cases it will be a hoax and is only designed to propagate. It is the email equivalent of chain-mail.

Hi Rusty,

i think you misread what Flossie was saying. I used to teach computers etc and by putting the fake address in your address book it works as Flossie says. I didn't get that information from anything fake but what the experts told me (and it works). It doesn't have to be aaa... so long as it starts with "a".

Deleted

C-ouch is there anything u can do to stop any spam mail from being sent to ure inbox from people u dnt even know

Do you mean the inbox on Keyboard, Ironman?

It won't do any harm to put a false address in, but there are plenty of worms in the wild that this will not stop.

What Inbox do you refer to? Who is your email service provider?

yahoo and gmail and even windows live

Have to agree 100% with RB here. It was a hoax pure and simple and could actually be dangerous.

Commentary:
This foolish and potentially dangerous hoax has now been circulating for several years. The message claims that putting a bogus email address as the first entry in your address book will thwart attempts by an email worm to propagate itself. According to the message, sending of the worm will be terminated because the first delivery will fail and the user will be alerted of the attempt to send the worm via an error message. This version espouses "AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA" as the bogus address of choice. Other versions extol the virtues of "!000000" as a first address book entry.


Adding AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA as the first entry in your email address book will NOT protect your computer from worms
Either way, this "trick" is seriously flawed and will do nothing whatsoever to protect you from almost all modern worms. These days, email worms are far too sophisticated to be controlled by such a simple procedure. Very few modern email worms harvest email addresses solely from your email program's address book. Most will scan the entire hard drive of the infected computer for email addresses and are therefore in no way reliant on address book entries. Also, most worms will not send themselves to all addresses at once. They are more likely to send a separately addressed message to each recipient and the addresses may not be used in the same order as they appear in an address book. Thus, a fake first entry address will not stop a worm even if it did send messages from the address book sequentially. The fake address will bounce, but other worm-laden messages will be sent without a problem.

And perhaps most importantly, many worms now use their own SMTP engine to send themselves, which means that they bypass your email program completely. Basically, such a worm comes loaded with everything it needs to establish a connection with a mail server and send itself to any email addresses it has harvested from the infected computer. Since the worm does not use an existing email application, the operator of the infected computer might not even be aware that a worm is propagating itself. Even if some of the worm messages do bounce because of fake or invalid addresses, the user will not receive any sort of error message.

This strategy may have been somewhat effective for the relatively primitive email worms of days gone by. However, these days it is virtually useless. In fact, rather than offer protection against worms, it may even make worm infections more likely. The inherent danger of this hoax is that users who apply this method may relax their guard and neglect viable anti-virus strategies.

The message claims that if "everybody you know does this then you need not ever worry about opening mail from family or friends". However this claim is doubly flawed. As explained above the "trick" is invalid and will not protect you from modern email worms. Moreover, many worms use address spoofing so that an email may not really be from a friend or family member, even if it appears to have his or her address in the "From:" field.

The only real protection against virus attack is to maintain a secure computing environment, run reliable and up-to-date anti-virus software and employ common sense. If you receive this "tip", please take a moment to let the sender know that it is not a viable method of email worm protection and should not be forwarded.

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/virus-control-hoax.html

The best tip I can offer is to get a free hotmail account and use that when ever you subscribe to anything on the net, leaving you personel email free for friends and family. Don't give that one out to anyone you do not trust. This way you will have a spam free account. If you already have a problem with your personel Email change it and do not use for anything that might attract spam eg signing up for some specific account on the web. One other thing, when signing up for anything don't just keep clicking next. A lot of sites have the check boxes ticked by default that say you allow them to share your email address with other "selected" people. :)