Mike (and everyone else),
That only means that someone who has Peter's email address in their
Outlook address book has the virus, lest there be any confusion. Those
inexperienced in these matters, which may possibly include a few
recipients of this list, might draw the wrong conclusion, and blame the
innocent, it happens all the time where viruses are concerned. Hopefully
no-one was blaming Peter, his only contribution to the scenario is to
have an email address.
I get several of these viruses every day, always purporting to be from
someone I don't actually know, the sad fact is that some people that do
know me, or at least have got my email address from somewhere, are
infected and are not doing anything about it. There seems to be no
practicable way of tracing them.
The best way to stop all this is for everyone to simply not use Outlook,
there are lots of free email client programs available. Sadly that will
not happen, most computer users neither know nor care if they have a
virus unless it affects them directly, which in this case is unlikely.
The virus writers are continuing to exploit security holes in Outlook
and Outlook Express which Microsoft can't or won't fix. The other golden
rule, or course, is to never, ever, click on an attachment unless you
know where it came from. I also would hope that everyone who reads this
is already keeping their anti-virus software up to date frequently.
This list is quite properly open to the general public (including me, I
am a mere amateur where mining history is concerned), so there is the
potential for lots of contributors to be anything but experienced and
professional computer users. I don't know if it is feasible for the
software which runs the list server to be adapted to perform virus
filtering, maybe the relevant person could look into that?
I suspect that most users of this list know all of this, but felt that I
should say something for the benefit of those less experienced in the
art of keeping their computer virus-free. It hopefully may help avoid a
problem somewhere. I hate to see people losing data or suffering damage,
suspicion or annoyance, because of the cretins who have nothing better
to do than create viruses.
Best regards to all,
Alan Campbell
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