General Tips & Info FAQ

Tip for avoiding viruses

Most times, when we're reading email, we simply click "Next" or we have our email program set to open the next message when we delete the last one. This can mean that we might accidentally open an email with a virus infected attachment even if we don't use the Preview Pane.

So, set up a filter or message rule and put it first in your filter/rule list to put *any* email with an attachment in a special "email with attachments" folder and then set it to "skip rest" or "stop processing". This will catch all emails with attachments and put them in a separate folder and you'll be alerted to be extra careful with those emails, review the From, To, Subject line, look at the full headers and make sure that your anti-virus software is updated before opening the email.

Some viruses won't appear as attachments tho, their virus infected file is encoded into the body of the email so to catch those, set up a second filter/rule to put any email over 50k in size into that "email with attachments" folder. This will catch some Yahoogroups digests so you could set the filter/rule to also check that the To field does *not* contain "@yahoogroups".

It's important to put these two filters/rules first in your list of filters or message rules so that the emails with attachments or large in size don't get moved to the regular list or private mail folders where it's easier to overlook the attachment or message size and open the email by mistake.

While what I've said here is mainly for Outlook Express and Eudora users, it can be applied to most any email program or webmail, most of them now have some sort of filtering or sorting method and even if they are safe from auto-executing viruses right now, you never know what those virus creating miscreants will come up with next. Better to double your protection than to take risks!

And of course, this doesn't replace having a good anti-virus program with update to date virus definitions! If you don't have anti-virus software, it's easy to get some, just click on the "Virus" category link on the right.