Re: [school-discuss] viruses and the list

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004 11:47, Keith Best wrote:
> Please remove me from this list.  I have recieved more viruses threw
> this list than anywhere else in my computing journies.

If you have a look at the full headers (or View Source), an activity 
which, I must admit, MS-Outlook doesn't encourage, you'll see this 
header:

X-To-Get-Off-This-List:
  mail majordomo@schoolforge.net, body unsubscribe schoolforge-discuss

If you examine the mail headers on the viruses, you'll probably discover 
two things:

 1. Every sender is using Outlook; and

 2. Some, possibly most of the viruses didn't come through the list,
    they just look like they did.

What the second point means is that you're probably not getting the 
viruses through remaining subscribed to the list, you're probably 
getting them from other MS-Outlook users with the list in their address 
books, or in their Internet Explorer caches from having viewed the list 
archives.

The implication is that unsubscribing won't help you.

I'm sorry that I can't comment on the viruses. I was getting a steady 
diet of nearly half a thousand a day from various sources (peaking at 
1000-1500 during major outbreaks such as MS-Blast) so I put the free 
ClamAV scanner on my mail server (via AMaViS) and rarely see one now.

I see that your Toshiba laptop is sending mail straight through your 
router and Bell South, but you're recieving mail via Yahoo. In order to 
use ClamAV yourself, you'll need to set your laptop up for dual-booting 
and get a Linux service like FetchMail to pull your mail from Yahoo to 
feed it through ClamAV to your email client.

Reading your mail and browsing the web is *much* safer under Linux 
anyway. I use and strongly recommend KMail on Mandrake Linux 10.0.

Cheers; Leon