Bagel Belly Blog

The virus damage spreads

I've been catching up on email, including the Cocoon mailing lists, since my network at home is out of action this morning (all praise NTHell!). There were a couple of threads on cocoon-dev about virus messages that got through to the list by appearing to be from me. I also got an email late yesterday from someone on the ALUG list. A couple of days ago, some nice person sent me 178 emails saying "stop sending damn virus!!!!!" or words to that effect.

So now, viruses have gone beyond the initial damage and destruction they cause - trashing unprotected Windows machines, which I am not overly bothered about - and onto meta-destruction: making uneducated people think I'm an infected Windows user, causing disruption on mailing lists, (possibly forcing me to re-subscribe to all my lists from a different (currently virus-free) email address), generating "bounced mail", "trapped virus", and "hey Andrew, I think you've got a virus" messages.

Meanwhile, my server-side spam filter is doing an admirable job, but it doesn't catch the virus mutation that sends attachments without filename extensions, and it doesn't block .zip extensions, since they are conceivably going to be in business emails. I'm still getting over a hundred viruses creeping through the filter each day. I can't just nuke the email address, since it's on several thousand business cards that I have handed (or have yet to hand) out.

Paul asked me the other day: "do you think this is the beginning of the end for email?" My response was "no, this is the middle of the end. We're making good progress down that road."

We're doomed, doomed, I tell you!