Dear Folks, As I had indicated last night, I had gotten into big doo doo where it seemed that everything went wrong with my computer and my Windows system. Everything was eratic, unstable and hardly anything worked at all. So early this evening I bit the bullet and used my Recovery Disks and started all over. But because I knew that it would wipe out everything on my hard drive, I saved any important data onto diskettes before I started. But lo and behold! I actually have my Outlook Express all hooked up for my email and I have access to the Internet. Of course I have to reinstall all of my hardware again, reinstall some programs and dig up all of my favorite Internet sites, but I don't anticipate any serious problem with that. The bottom line is that it appears that the recovery disks solved the problem. I have an idea what caused the problem in the first place. Last evening I received an email message "obviously" from my ISP Adelphia telling me that they would be shutting down for two day but that my email would be forwarded to me if I copied the password they gave me, open the attachment and register with my password. I tried that, it didn't work, I called Adelphia and found out that the whole thing was phoney and has been going on for several weeks. Adelphia said that when they have any information to pass on to their subscribers, they would NEVER include attachments. So a word of warning here. If you receive an email from your ISP and there's an attachment to it, DON'T OPEN IT! Call your ISP instead and ask them if it's a valid email sent by them. Glad to be back to normal again. vee

Our provider advised us of these scams and, sure enough, we are still getting these &#$* scam emails. Anna ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vee L. Housman" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2004 10:29 PM Subject: [FOLKS] I'm back to normal(?) > Dear Folks, > > As I had indicated last night, I had gotten into big doo doo where it seemed that everything went wrong with my computer and my Windows system. Everything was eratic, unstable and hardly anything worked at all. So early this evening I bit the bullet and used my Recovery Disks and started all over. But because I knew that it would wipe out everything on my hard drive, I saved any important data onto diskettes before I started. > > But lo and behold! I actually have my Outlook Express all hooked up for my email and I have access to the Internet. Of course I have to reinstall all of my hardware again, reinstall some programs and dig up all of my favorite Internet sites, but I don't anticipate any serious problem with that. The bottom line is that it appears that the recovery disks solved the problem. > > I have an idea what caused the problem in the first place. Last evening I received an email message "obviously" from my ISP Adelphia telling me that they would be shutting down for two day but that my email would be forwarded to me if I copied the password they gave me, open the attachment and register with my password. I tried that, it didn't work, I called Adelphia and found out that the whole thing was phoney and has been going on for several weeks. Adelphia said that when they have any information to pass on to their subscribers, they would NEVER include attachments. So a word of warning here. If you receive an email from your ISP and there's an attachment to it, DON'T OPEN IT! Call your ISP instead and ask them if it's a valid email sent by them. > > Glad to be back to normal again. > vee > >

I'll second Vee's warning. Yesterday, I received a message which claimed to be from my server, Red-Canyon, saying they had received complaints from others that spam was being sent from my e-mail address. The message said that I must have a Trojan_?_ in my system and to click on the attachments they included and then use the number they gave me as a password to find directions how to correct the problem. It was signed Your Red-Canyon help group (or words to that effect) and even gave the URL for Red-Canyon website! I was astonished as I have an Anti-virus program that scans everything I receive and everything I send. Since, my server is local, I forwarded the message to Dave, asking him "Is this for real? etc." Then, even though my anti-vrius program runs a complete scan every Friday automatically, I ran another anti-vrius scan which came out "No errors." Sometime later I received a reply from Dave, who said, "These people who send viruses are getting smarter all the time. It was a bogus message. Good thing I hadn't clicked on the attachments as the message actually contained a virus. Wow! So, watch all incoming e-mail and don't believe anything that appears to come from your server with attachments, as Vee warns. Faith

Vee, el al: I had a similar things happen to me awhile back, but mine said that someone got an email from me that was infected, and the person I supposedly sent it I knew, which I didn't! My anti virus program runs a scan every Friday, too, and it didn't catch anything, thank goodness I didn't open the attachment! These guys are getting smarter all the time, and if I get something with an attachment from someone I don't know, I won't open it. Kim