Alan Whytock wrote:

> I recently heard of an ingenious method of alerting computer viruses
> which I, fortunately, have not had the chance to ascertain its
> effectiveness, but it appears so simple.

Well, the way to ascertain its effectiveness, as with all sorts of free
"advice" which trolls its way through the 'Net, is to do a little bit
of simple, online research.

The "hoaxbusters" site administered by CIAC (the Computer Incident
Advisory Capability, which is a division of the U.S. Department of
Energy) provides some information about this "fix", which can be
summarized by these sentences:

 "For the current crop of worms that spread via e-mail, which
  contain their own internal mailer, this would do nothing.
  Your time would be much better spent installing a good
  antivirus program and keeping it updated."

(quoted from http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBMalCode.shtml)

An even better solution would be to use e-mail software which is
not vulnerable to worms, viruses, and all that nonsense.  I use the
"Pine" program which is developed by the University of Washington --
presumably they don't want their entire campus to be inundated by
e-nasties, so the vulnerabilities were not coded into the software.
Very simple!  You'd think their neighbours in Redmond would clue into
this, but alas, several years after "Melissa" they still haven't
received this very simple message.

Colin Hinz
Toronto, Canada