Good Morning to everyone. I hope each of you had a nice turkey day! I've been on a diet for the last couple of months and I think I shot it all to hello and back. <grin> My reason for writing this morning concerns the worms, viruses etc that are hitting us now. I wish I understood what pleasure these idiots get from writing these things. <shrug> Anyway... over the past few days I've noticed an awful lot of emails that contain these nasty little things making it to my ISP but being captured by them, cleaned and then forwarded on to my inbox where I can check them and if I think it was really something I wanted or needed I could contact the sender. What is different you might ask? Well... they are all supposedly coming from RootsWeb mail lists or RootsWeb list admins. Here's just a few things to watch for and keep in mind so you don't become infected... RootsWeb does not allow attachments on any list... if you get something that looks like it came from a list and you aren't on that list, delete it unread. If you get something that looks like it is coming from a list admin [the From: addy is something like kyhopkin-admin@rootsweb.com or kyhopkin-d-request@rootsweb.com], delete it unread. Rootsweb forwards email sent to the admins at those list-admin addy's to the list admin, but we can't send mail from those admin addy's... it's definately spam or worse. Also note that you will NEVER receive email from list-d-request@rootsweb.com... when request is used in the addy it is sent TO the server and indicates a command that the server is to do... such as sub or unsub the sender to or from that list. If you get something from anyone, even a friend, and it has an attachment, quaranteen that email until you can contact the person it came from to confirm they sent it. A good rule of thumb is tell everyone to send you an email first to let you know it's coming and tell you what the subject line will be. Delete it unread when it comes in if it doesn't have that subject line. That's kinda harsh but we can't be too careful these days. I'm sure that some of you have other "rules" that you follow to try to keep yourself from being infected. I'm equally sure that a few don't do anything at all and one day will be sorry,. ;-) One of the things I have done is to use MailWasher faithfully. I never download my email without running it thru MailWasher first and I highly recommend this FREE software. You'll find it at http://www.mailwasher.net I have one caveat... MailWasher has problems when used with Windows ME. It works fine with 98 and also with XP. Another trick is figure out something you can do with your own addy so that folks you correspond with will know it's really from you. For example, if your addy is: joeblow@myISP.com You might have your email program set to show: FROM: Joe Blow "joeblow@myISP.com" If Joe Blow's addy is spoofed by one of these worms/viruses etc it might look like this: FROM: joeblow "joeblow@myISP.com" You know it's not really from him because his name is wrong before the addy. Take a look at the FROM: line on this email... if you get something that looks like it is from me but the FROM: doesn't have Nancy T R I C E you know it isn't really from me. ;-) Enough already... this is longer than I intended. For those of you still reading, I hope I have given you some suggestions to help you. Have a great rest of the weekend! Best, nt