Today alone I had 12 copies of the email worm sent to me out of a total of 39 emails I received today.
Dale
That’s what you get for being so popular. 
Were they unintentional attatchments by innocent welldoers? Friends sending emails (likely unbeknownst by them)? Or were they the infamous “unknown” emails … the ones with the familiar subject headers, but unfamiliar email addresses?
Inquistive Minds want to know!!!
i.e. weird people who have been techs for over 10 years like to know. 
Anybody whose e-mail address is in many address books tends to see a lot of copies of viruses and trojans. In the last two days I’ve received probably thirty copies of the darn thing. So people who run extremely popular websites, like Dale and I 
get flooded with the darn things.
The really wierd thing is that this time I’ve received four or five copies for addresses I know for a fact don’t exist because they are for my domain but are addresses I haven’t ever used. Now, anything at my domain that isn’t otherwise defined gets forwarded to me (you could write to “heyyoustupidjerk at guitarnuts dot com” and I’d get it), but there is no reason for anyone to have ever sent email to “sarah at guitarnuts dot com” and such!
Yep, that’s what I was curious about. Most of the time viruses simply propogate themselves by ripping through a persons address book and happily sending themselves off to everyone there, but lately there’s been the nifty advent of the ‘anyonewithafunkydoodaname@yourdomain.com’ I’ve noticed… more than usual. Many of my regular contacts have reported it to me anyway. I was curious if Dale was receiving the later or not. Sorry to hear you have too! Bummer. Pain in the butt!
Fortunately I use Linux, so I don’t have an issue other than the annoying emails themselves which I receive from time to time.
People are interesting creatures. Gotta have something to do with your time I guess. Wreaking havoc with others must be extremely gratifying somehow I suppose.
Take care,
John
I received one today that was new to me. It said email returned. Undeliverable. Reason: then an address I have never seen and certainly didn’t originate from my address. Then it said click on the link below for details. I deleted it and then permanently deleted it.
Ron
Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great! Macs are great!
Just repeat the mantra…
Macs are overpriced! Macs are overpriced! Macs are…
Seriously, I don’t know what the big deal is. I’ve been online from home since about 1991 and from work long before that – using a PC and Windoze at home all that time and for the last 7 years or so at work. In all that time I have never been infected by a virus or trojan at home and I’ve been infected exactly one time at work by a spyware program (I think somebody else around here must have used my computer).
If you are going to be dumb enough to open an attachment on a message that says, for example, that it is a returned message you never sent, well, don’t come crying to me
Also, Macs aren’t immune to viruses, and neither is Linux (which I’ve used and actually prefer to Windoze, BTW) – there just aren’t enough of either in use to make it worth a virus pusher’s time.
I have a Mac at work and one at home. I still receive these things by the truck load. I must be popular too.
Actually, they are being sent from fake addresses generated in fairly random ways I think as well as real addresses, ‘stolen’ for the purpose. I’ve received several copies purporting to be from me. I’ve also received many copies from people who don’t exist or, if they do, have a different address. I think that they take typical email addresses, say an address type common to all people at a certain university, and then simply generate fake names that otherwise fit the pattern. Suppose someone has an address like andrewa@uop.blah blah, the virus disseminators will generate mail from andrewb@uop.balh blah, andrewc and so on.
I typically get about 5-10 legitimate emails per day and about 250-300 spams and virus/trojan mails. Even though it greatly reduces my potential software customer base, sometimes I am glad that the Mac is not very popular.
ronkiley, i got that same one yesterday…actually i didn’t open it to find out if it was the same one, but it sure matched your description!
If only Windows users knew about Outlook Express (Outlook Depressed is a better name) and would simply download Peagasus Mail or some similar e-mail client.
No matter how much it is in the news, it never sinks in, just like pouring water onto a penguin’s back.
Thank goodness for the zero cost operating system Linux which runs on almost any computer platform.
How anyone lives without SpamAssassin with todays e-mails is beyond me. 
BTW I worked in the computer field most of my life. Some of those early ones were electro-mechanical. I have used CPM which, BG used to fashion DOS, Unix, several other -nixes, DOS and all of the Windows versions. I worked with MACs also. I prefer PCs with Win XP over the others. Nothing wrong with the others. They have their good points and their troubles too. I also prefer to roll my own when it comes to systems.
John, I don’t see how you can get by with no spyware on your system. There are whistle related sites that add spy cookies to your system. I run spybot at least every other day. I find a few cookies every time such as doubleclick. I should put a rule in my system to block them but I haven’t done it yet.
It seems that these idiots keep finding new ways to try and sucker us in. They should have their bits scrambled and spread over the cess pool.
Ron
I agree… scrambled they should be!! on the side.. with toast!!
I’ve been dinking around with computers since the days of the Timex Sinclair 1000 and everything in between up to now and all who have stated are right… NOTHING is entirely immune, but I will take one last shot before I shut up…
Of all the YEARS I’ve had to work on M$ products… not just the operating systems, but BackOffice, Office, SQL, and then let’s go on to AS/400 (hell hath no fury like an AS/400 server scorned), Novell, on and on the list goes.
For many many newbies and for the ‘power users’ I’m sorry but pick your distribution and Linux is just pretty slick and inherently stable. M$ pales by comparrison… whether it be price or otherwise.
On the flip-side… one OS most people have never heard of, and will most likely never make it past certain applications, is QNX. Very nifty and TIGHT little OS. TINY TINY TINY operating system that has everything you need to create a complete server / workstation with any major software needed. Cool.
Ok, I’m done
Bye.
I feel like a dinosauer since the first computer I worked with was an IBM 360 using punch cards.
Angelo
Dinosaurs of the world, unite! (Me, too. I think I still have a deck of cards with my first working Fortran IV program somewhere.)
DOS Forever!
I have a Teletype Corp. KSR-33 that I keep around for Nostaligia and also a Western Union Deskfax complete with Vacuum Tubes.
I’d love to get my hands on an Dec LA-36 or LA-120 those where nice teleprinters, just to set up a system and run the teletype based Start Trek program or Adventure one more time.
Well… at least you weren’t using the ORIGINAL “bug in the system” computer. You know the ones that coined the phrase?
Fun fact for those that don’t know… the origin of the term “bug” in reference to a problem with the computer is derived from when computers were first conceived and were the huge machines taking up rooms in and of themselves. The huge computers wroked off of large cellenoids or switches that opened and closed (1s and 0s) … well, one day nobody could figure out why a program had stopped working all of a sudden. Checekd and rechecked… finally someone went through the entire system, and a moth had gotten clamped in between one of the switches… obviously disabling that contact from the ‘mush’.
Hence… we have and forever shall have “bugs in the system”
(I remember we did the punchcards in Fortran class at SMSU in my first CompSci class years ago. Never had to work on them, but it was an interesting experience)
Take care,
John
I remember my BASIC class, we would timeshare a system that was 100 miles away and load our programs from paper tape into the teletype. The modem was one of those deals where you put the phone receiver down into the cups and dial out with a rotary dial phone. Some of the more ‘advanced’ teletypes had their own built-in phone dials.
I took a 1024 bit ram chip to class and everyone was amazed that 1024 bits could be put on a chip. This was around 1980, you could buy the memory chips at Radio Shack.
John you are quite right on the origin of the “bug”. The person who coined the term was Admiral Grace Hopper. She was a wonderful lady that pioneered in many areas of computing. When she gave talks about systems she was fond of handing out “nanoseconds”, a piece of wire nine inches long. She would explain that many people had a hard time grasping how small a nanosecond was. She would then bring out this big coil of cable and tell everyone that an electric impulse traveling at the speed of light would take a millisecond to travel the length of this cable. Then she would show the nine inch wire and explain that the same impulse would take a nanosecond to travel the length of this wire.
I had a timing problem on a board one time. I just needed a nanosecond delay on the pulse. Remembering Grace I cut the land and soldered a nine inch length of wire across the gap. It worked perfect.
The first electronic digital computer I was involved in was the Univac 1. To check the memory you opened the door and walked into the memory bank. You could then isolate a small section of memory and take the tubes out and test them.
Please don’t remind me of loading a fortran compiler on paper tape with a KSR 33 TTY. I used to do this with an Interdata Model 70.
Our progress over my lifetime has been amazing.
Ron