More viruses being sent directly to list users

[Steve Harrison]

Dave, AI7R:

Maybe you should CLOSE the archives altogether for a few weeks until
sometime after New Year's?? After all, we managed to get by without
archives for several years. Anyone needing access might obtain approval, or
a new URL address, from yourself. This should kill this virus-spreader dead.

I just received my FIFTH self-addressed, self-stamped "virus-carrier"
message. But this time, it didn't manage to download the virus attachment.

Why not??

SIMPLE: in most e-mailers, you have an option available to limit the size
of ANY e-mail to be downloaded. Previously, I've had my size limit set
arbitrarily to 130 kB because I was periodically receiving some software to
Alpha-test; that test program is long over. Last night, I finally
remembered this and reset the download size limit to just 10 kilobytes.
That may cause me to not download some longer e-mails; but more
importantly, it will allow ME to choose WHICH of those larger e-mails I
want to download.

So now, I simply receive the portion of the e-mail that fits within my
chosen 10 kB size limit; at the bottom of all larger e-mails (which first
part is downloaded with the remainder of the large message truncated),
there's a note that if I want to receive the whole thing, I just click the
Server icon at the top and download again, and here it comes.

This is NOT foolproof: those larger e-mails will be left on your ISP's
machine for some time, waiting to sneak down your phone lines some day when
you reset that limit large enough.

I'm not sure, but believe that most ISPs have a time limit after which they
automatically delete older e-mail that hasn't been downloaded. You can
check with your ISP for that feature, warn them of the virus attachment
problem, and ask them to set autodelete of undownloaded e-mail to something
like a week or a few days.

I also downloaded Symantec's trial version of AntiVirus 2000 last night.
I'm missing something about how to set it up to scan incoming e-mail
because it reset my POP account to a DNS server that would not connect to
my ISP; so I had to disable automatic e-mail scanning... for now, anyway.
There were a few other problems I ran into while downloading; but this is a
Heath reflector so I won't go into it further.

73, Steve K0XP

Sponsored by the City of Tempe 

Listserver Submissions:  heath at listserv.tempe.gov
Listserver Subscription: listserv at listserv.tempe.gov - "subscribe heath 'name' 'call'"
Listserver Unsubscribe: listserv at listserv.tempe.gov - -"signoff heath"