I got an unpleasant surprise the other day – A hacker had accessed my Hotmail account and sent a spam to everyone on my address list!
I had to apologize to them all for something I had no control over – or so I thought!
I heard from my daughter-in-law of a brilliant strategy her father had been told to follow to prevent anyone from sending spam mail from his email account.
It’s so simple and clever, that I felt everyone should know how to protect their contact list from being accessed and spammed!
This is the strategy to prevent a virus mailing:
When a worm virus gets into your computer, it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in it, thus infecting all your friends and associates.
This strategy won’t keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that a worm has got into your computer.
Here’s what you do:
First, open your address book and click on ‘new contact,’ just as you would do if you were adding a new contact to your list of email addresses. In the window where you would type the contact’s first name, type in ‘ A’.
For the email address, type AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA
Here’s the explanation of what you’ve just done, and why it works:
The name ‘A’ will be placed at the top of your address book as being the first alphabetical entry.
This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your contacts.
When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the bogus email address you entered. When the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and none of your contacts will be infected.
And, when an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. So, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!
Simple, as all brilliant ideas are, and very effective!
So, DO IT NOW and pass this on to all your friends.
To your good health,
Roshmi & Jay
http://www.youngagainforever.com