So many virus messages, so little time ...
The first day of our SoMousepad Competition (complete rules) ended with a bunch of entries (but don't worry - there's still time, so send in your tallies and Sobig anecdotes!). For example, Oliver writes:
"My employers have been online since 1994 or so. AFAIK, they were one of the first businesses in the city to become convinced that they absolutely had to have a web site. Unfortunately, one of my predecessors convinced them that they also needed to have their email addresses published on said website. Thus, not only are they all on every spam list in existence, their email addresses are in the web caches of tens of thousands of users. While the "Let's put our email addresses on every mailing list in the universe" strategy certainly keeps the postmaster busy blocking spammers and battling things like Sobig, I would advise against it for anyone else.
"When Sobig.F hit, I knew right away, since as best I can tell, each infected machine hits every address in it's list every ten minutes or so. Kudos to the guy who wrote mailwasher, because it flags them all as "Possible Virus", which makes the hundreds messages that show up when I do my hourly sweeps easy to delete."
Yep, I've noticed a similar phenomenon: My name and address is plastered all over the place, so I'm getting tons of these puppies. My wife, who's far quieter online, hasn't gotten a one.
As of yesterday afternoon, Janna reports getting 2,024 Sobig messages. James says he could probably top that, but his account that's getting all the Sobig messages has a 50Mbye quota so he's "only" seeing about 500 a day.
Meanwhile, the p.r. company for Raxco Software, writes to warn me of a dire Sobig problem: "Sobig Swiss Cheese." Yeah, who knew computer viruses could jump to curdled milk? OK, they really mean that people busy deleting zillions of Sobig messages (and in my case, stupid, completely wrong virus-scanner messages) will leave their hard drives full of holes, and you know what that means, right?
And the best Sobig-related stupid error message I got was from sandy@nose-n-toes.com, simply because, my God, go figure that there's a domain called nose-n-toes. Even better, it's not some weird fetish site like you'd think - it sells llama-related collectibles and clothing (yes, llama-related - what *did* we do before the Web?). Or, at least, it did yesterday. Today, their server seems to be down. Must be all the people rushing to the site to buy llama prints.
Back to CompendiumMailwasher is good, and look good. So many people use it, but I like more Spam Bully for Outlook/Outlook Express from http://www.spambully.com/clickbank2.php . I use him for 4 month and now I don't have problems with spams. This is only my opinion. So many people in world, so many opinions :)
Posted by: Sierra on September 25, 2003 02:52 AMHas anyone tried Firetrust Benigh? That is a perfect companion to any of the email filter programs on the market. Benign works quite differently from any of thoese email filter programs out there. I personally use it and like it a lot.
Instead of filtering emails using fuzzy logic, Benign NULLIFIES all malicious email viruses, worms, scripts, HTML codes by rewriting your emails. It keeps all the texts, including HTML format, making every email safe to open and read. It even rewrite your email attachments, making them safe to open as well -- if you must open them.
It is such a tiny program works between my remote email server and my local outlook, intercepting and cleaning each mail before it reaches my email inbox. As I see it, it is the grass-root solution to all email born viruses, old or new, it strips them all.
Highly recommend it to all! For more info, please go to: http://gain4you.net/safemail.html
Posted by: Jun on September 26, 2003 12:01 AMI tried and now I'm using bayesian spam filter "SpamBully 2" for Outlook and Outlook Express. SpamBully is one of the best pieces of software I have purchased. I was getting well over 100 spam emails per day until I downloaded this product. I tried others, even the one that is supposedly rated #1, but as far as I am concerned, Spam Bully is #1! Thanks for an excellent program. It has brought sanity back to email.
Posted by: Andrew Ciconni on January 22, 2004 10:37 AMPost a comment
