Carecure email messages

[Wise Young]

A number of people have called my office indicating that they are receiving emails containing viruses from carecure. As far as I know, this cannot happen and this is very likely to be due to a rash of email viruses that is spreading all over the PC world. What the latest rash of viruses do is to infect email, pick names from your email address book, and then send emails to those addresses but pretending that the email comes from email addresses in the address book. Thus, for example, although I use solely a Macintosh computer that is not affected by this virus, many people have received virus-laden emails that seem to be from me. My computer did not send these emails.
They are coming from people who have my email address on their addressbooks.

It appears that this is beginning to happen with the carecure email address as well. People may have the carecure email address in their address books (as the originating address for email digests or reports that they have requested). Any mail that comes from the carecure forums should have been requested either by registering or by request of an email report or digest of a topic.

The main carecure community web site runs on an OSX operating system and Apache server software. It is not susceptible to the viruses that affect Window computers. To my knowledge, there is no current active virus that causes our server to send out emails. Likewise, this bulletin board is run by Infopop on Unix and should not send out any unsolicited emails. The only email that is sent out from this site are email reports or digests of postings that members have requested. Although we have the capability to do so, we have never to date in the past year sent out an email broadcast to members.

Wise.

[Max]

How I got computer STD http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/images/smilies/smile.gif from Marmalady via Seneca http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/images/smilies/smile.gif http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[Wise Young]

Max, I think that the new rash of email viruses probably did not come from Marmalady and Seneca. Rather, it comes from people who have your email address in their email address book. Like me, your email address probably is in a lot of email address books. What the virus does is to go into email address book, extract names, and then send off email, pretending to be the person sending the email.

For example, my email address (because I have put it on this web site and because many many people have my email address on their email programs) is probably on thousands of computers that use Outlook Express. So, whenever one of the them gets one of these email viruses, it sends an email out pretending to be sent from me. I got a lot of irate phone calls from people thinking that my computer was the culprit.

Macs are not affected by most of these email viruses because they utilized the macro language that affects Windows. In any case, I just hope that these email viruses subside because I am probably getting several dozen of Window virus messages per day. While they cannot affect my computer and email program (I use Eudora on a Mac), they are annoying because they take up space and I have to delete them. Seneca uses a Mac, like I do.

Wise.

[marmalady]

Hey - Max - my computer is squeaky clean. Nothing gets in under the protection I have now; anything that's infected is automatically placed in a protected bin to be deleted. The 'Klez' virus is all over the place; I still get notice that one has tried to infiltrate, but the protection program has cleaned it up.

Spend the $$ to get a good protection program.

BTW, Wise, Chris just informed me that his next computer will be a Mac!! http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

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Tough times don't last - tough people do.