While I appreciate the generous intentions behind sending virus warnings to the mailing list, I do want to remind everyone that this is not the place to send those warnings. Let's keep this list entirely focused on the "job" of being County Coordinators and volunteers in the USGenWeb Project. The following was posted to the Internet Tourbus <http://www.TOURBUS.com> on 2 April: >Seriously, though, how damaging WAS the Melissa virus? To be >completely honest, it wasn't as bad as you heard. The virus (which, >technically, isn't even a virus) doesn't really do much harm to your >computer. The worst thing it does is fire up Outlook, spray out 50 >email messages to the folks in your Outlook address book, and attach >an infected Word document to each of those emails. Yawn. > >What no one seems to be picking up on is the fact that the Melissa >hysteria is causing more damage than the virus itself. Case in >point: the General Manager of HiWAAY Information Services, one of the >best Internet Service Providers in the country, recently posted the >following to Usenet: > > Our mail storage shot way up over the weekend ... so I wrote a > program to search the 25,000 mailboxes on our system .... copies > of the Melissa virus actually found was two (2). But there were > thousands of various versions of WARNINGS of the virus (with > some people having as many at 10 or 15 different messages > warning them about it). > >I have no doubt that the 50 email messages generated by Melissa- >infected machines running Outlook created a huge strain on the world's >mail servers. However, my bet is that hysteria-generated Melissa >virus warnings exceeded actual Melissa-generated posts by at least a >factor of ten thousand. When you hear of corporate servers crashing >from the "weight of Melissa," take those reports with a grain of salt. >Chances are, what really crashed those servers were the millions of >"beware of Melissa" emails that were sent out. The simple fact is that at RootsWeb as at the site quoted above, the traffic ABOUT the virus did the most harm. Regards, Leigh