Mary wants to know about an old "trick" to prevent email worms from grabbing addresses
Can you really protect your address book from virus (worm) by typing in AAAAAAA in new contact area, thus assuring a return mail if hackers try to send mail from your address book?

Our answer
This is one of the oldest misconceptions about email worms that scour your computer for addresses in order to send duplicates of itself (or spam) to everyone in your address book. Email worms get addresses from everywhere on you computer, like email message bodies, email headers, Word documents, Web pages stored in your Temporary Internet Files, etc. These worms and viruses collect email addresses from wherever they are on your computer and send email to every email they collect. These emails may contain duplicates of the virus or worm itself, or more commonly, they'll use your computer to send spam. A spambot can do the same thing once it infects your computer.

If you're using Windows Mail or Outlook Express, you can prevent any email being sent from your computer by simply doing two things:

1. Make sure you have a good anti-virus installed and keep it updated because this will prevent you from being infected with a worm, virus, or spambot in the first place.

2. Open Outlook Express or Windows Mail, click Tools/Options then click the security tab and make sure the box that says "Warn me when other applications try to send mail as me" is checked.

Don't every fall for the urban legend that you can defeat sophisticated worms, viruses, or spambots, the purpose of which is to gather email addresses from your computer and send spam or malicious attachments to them, by putting aaaaaaa or 00000000 in your contact list/address book. It never works and it never has.

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