I recently heard of an ingenious method of alerting computer viruses
which I, fortunately, have not had the chance to ascertain its
effectiveness, but it appears so simple.

As you know when a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight
for your email address book and sends itself to everyone there, thus
infecting all your friends and associates.  The following trick will
not keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it
from going any further.  And it will alert you to the fact that it is
in your system.

Here's what you should do - open your address book and add a new
contact.  In the window where it prompts you to enter the new friends
name type !000 (that's an exclamation mark followed by three zeros).
In the window below where it prompts you to enter the new email address
type in WormAlert.  Then complete everything by clicking add, enter,
OK, etc.

Now here's what you have done and why it works : the name !000 will
be placed at the top of you address book as entry No 1.  This will be
where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your
friends.  But when it tries to send itself to !000 it will be
undeliverable because of the bogus email address that you entered
(WormAlert).  As the first attempt fails the worm goes no further and
your friends will not be infected.

The second advantage of this is that if an email cannot be delivered
you will be notified of this almost immediately.  So if you ever get
an email telling you that an email addressed to WormAlert could not
be delivered, you know right away that you have a worm virus in your
system.  You can then take steps to get rid of it.

I hope this saves a lot of time and effort.

Alan Whytock