[clug] Norton AntiVirus detected and quarantined a virus in a message yo u sent.

[Pearl Louis]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004 08:36 am, Darren Freeman wrote:
> This email is an indication that:
>
> a) you need to stop using NAV for Microsoft Exchange
> b) you need to stop using Windows
>
> or c) both of the above.
>
> Darren
>
> On Sun, 2004-04-18 at 20:06, NAV for Microsoft Exchange-NTSERVER wrote:
> > Recipient of the infected attachment:  Annetjie Fogg\Inbox
> > Subject of the message:  Mail Delivery (failure afogg at meumannwhite.co.za)
> > One or more attachments were quarantined.
> >   Attachment message.scr was Quarantined for the following reasons:
> >     Virus W32.Netsky.P at mm was found.

One has to wonder why most virus scanners are set up to automatically send 
back messages that the message has been infected etc. etc. - with a copy of 
the infected message no less.  The thing is a lot of viruses today falsify 
the sending address so by having these autoreplies you are at best wasting 
bandwidth and at worse causing panic attacks in less technically adept users 
who see this message saying that they have a virus blah, blah and believe it 
and possibly infecting them (with the virus laden attachment).  I mean can't 
they at least run a check through a list of known viruses that falsify 
addresses first?  How difficult can that be?

Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine, since for a while, all of my free email 
addresses on things like yahoo were unusable because in 10 minutes, the space 
filled up entirely with a combination of actual viruses and these autoreplies 
containing huge virus laden messages saying these things (if you keep on 
refreshing the page you could literally see the % of the mail box filled 
increase in real time).  I didn't even bother clearing them out at all.  
Things have gotten a lot better now, mainly because most of the autoreplies 
seem to be marked by spam filters as spam now and sent to the Bulk mail 
folder.  I wonder if these autoreplying email addresses send legit mail to 
yahoo email accounts (eg. details of registration), whether yahoo would mark 
them as spam as well?  No idea how yahoo's spam filters work.  Of course 
having them automatically sent to the bulk mail folder (or deleted depending 
on your preferences) defeats the purpose of these autoreplies in the first 
place (to warn people that they may have a virus) which means legit ones (ie. 
for those viruses that don't falsify addresses) don't reach the user anymore 
as well.