There are two simple steps you can take to protect yourself against viruses. I have never seen them discussed on any mail list, or elsewhere. One is to set your antivirus program to check incoming email attachments. You thought yours did it automatically? Well think again. Norton Antivirus 2000 on Dell computers does not. You have to choose the option yourself. If you don't, the viruses are welcomed by your computer. What must Norton be thinking of? Why do they think we buy their antivirus? Don't they know that most of us receive our viruses from email attachments? Dell doesn't help out either. They just let it stay the way they get it, and then blame Norton. It took me many months to find the option on my own, but only after wrestling many times with virurses. I wrote a webpage today that gives specific directions for choosing this option. I also wrote about an email from which I received a virus even though it had NO visible attachment (the only one I ever received like it). And I give a possible second method of preventing many viruses (probably including the email without the attachment). The method was advised by a very knowledgeable friend who for many years has been in charge of computers and software for a large organization. I give specific instructions on how to choose this option with Netscape and Internet Explorer. http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~clifflamere/Aid/AID-VirusProtect.htm My apologies to those people who do not like to see virus warnings, etc. on a genealogy mail list. However, I could not remain silent any longer about something that I know that many of you can do to quickly protect yourself from incoming viruses. I keep hearing about the need to be cautious about opening attachments. But, I have never heard that your antivirus should protect you even if you did open one that contained a virus. Well, it is supposed to, but we have not been told that before. And most of don't know that we have to make a conscious choice to have an antivirus protect us against viruses in email attachments, because it won't do it otherwise. I don't want to start a discussion of this subject on the mail list. If you have comments, you may want to direct them to me privately. If you have questions, I'm sorry, but I know very little about viruses and I don't know anything about software that isn't mentioned on my webpage. I'm trying to help, but I'm no expert. Cliff