[LargeFormat] Recent Virus

[Clive Warren]

At 6:04 pm +0000 1/12/01, philip Lambert wrote:
>Curiously I just this minute had a message from Scoot.com that something I
>sent them had a virus. What is strange about this is I never sent them
>anything. Are you confident about your virus-free list?  Philip

Hello Philip,

Yep - totally confident.

As has already been mentioned by Verna and Les, these viri (?) 
usually propagate by going through the OutLook EMail address book of 
the affected machine and sending themselves out to other people in 
the address book.

There is no way that they can be propagated through the mailing list.

Uncle Dick has been very responsible in warning people on the list 
that some of you are in his address book and may well receive the 
virus. He has also isolated his infected machine until it has been 
sorted.

One easy way to avoid infection is by junking OutLook and using a 
more professional (and easier to use) Email Client such as Eudora 
(http://www.eudora.com) so that you are not subject to the particular 
Outlook virus of the month.

I have been using Eudora on PCs and Macs for many years and virus 
like EMail attachments have no effect on my machines and are not 
transmitted to anyone else through my address book etc.

If you are using Outlook, check your machine for the file that Les 
mentioned and if you find it, delete it and do a quick search using 
Google - you will find plenty of resources to help you sort out any 
infection.

So, the list cannot propagate a virus as EMail attachments are not 
permitted - any attachment is stripped out well before the message 
reaches the list. I have also made the maximum message size an 
appropriate figure so that in the future people who try to post HTML 
in a reply or reply to a digest message copying the digest contents 
in the reply will also probably exceed the limit and be blocked.

The list is safe!

Cheers,
         Clive