Viruses continue to be the top billing visit that I make to most first time customers around town. I just spent over four hours cleaning up and rebuilding a system after the Nimda Virus finished infecting literally thousands of files across two PCs on a home network. He had Norton’s latest version, but something had happened during a recent upgrade to disable the automatic protection and he had ignored the warning error message. We finally ended up formatting and rebuilding one of the PC’s because it kept wanting to get re-infected with Nimda. Apparently it left a back door in the system registry someplace. The customer is now behind a hardware firewall device, has Zone Alarm on all his PCs, has the latest version of Norton System Works 2002 installed on his systems and is virus free at last!

Have you been the recipient of that latest bogus Microsoft security warning? It always has an attachment file such as "q216309.exe" just like a normal Microsoft security patch would be named. The text of the e-mail message appears to be very legit as well, until you look closely at the sending address. The message will be addressed to "Microsoft Customer". The message starts out with. . . 

A new freeware utility program I just ran across is called MailWasher, available for a free download at  MailWasher . This is a small program that lets you download headers, just like Outlook XP. However, you can also mark those repeatedly sending you Spam to be on your blacklist. Among other things, this means that messages from them will be bounced back, as if your e-mail address no longer exists. MailWasher has many other powerful tools, and it's now a keeper on my desktop. If you've been looking for a SPAM solution, check it out. You can run it as a freeware tool, but do consider reaching into your pocket and support the program with a voluntary donation.

One caller asked about receiving mail messages with attachments from an XP user, messages that could not be opened by Outlook Express 6.0. Apparently the sender was running the latest Outlook 2002 and was forwarding attachments which he had received, such as a joke photo, etc. For some reason, apparently the security built into the new Outlook automatically blocks "high risk" attachments to protect the user. This may be what is causing this caller's problem. He can get messages from his friend without attachments, but not those with attachments being forwarded. The caller received an attachment is received with the ".email" suffix rather than the normal ".eml" suffix. 

Outlook 2002 has three levels of classifications for attachments. 

The Level 1 "unsafe" category represents any extension that may have script or code associated with it. Any attachment with an "unsafe" file extension is inaccessible if you use a version of Outlook that has the security patch applied to it. This includes the usual line of suffixes, such as .exe, .com, .bat, .dll, etc. 

Level 2 files are not "unsafe" but they do require more security than other attachments. When you receive a Level 2 attachment, you are prompted to save the attachment to a disk; you cannot open the attachment from within the e-mail message. 

Level 3 is what you have grown to expect, when you try to open an attachment other than those in the "unsafe" or Level 2 lists, you are prompted to either open the file directly or to save it to a disk. You can turn off future prompts for that extension if you click to clear the "Always ask before opening this type of file" check box.