[xm177e2]

Will Norton protect against these viruses? I'm getting lots of "Mailer Daemon" replies telling me my email addy is sending viruses, but I've got Norton running on my computer. The email account in question is Hotmail; I assume M$ has protection against allowing Hotmail accounts to send virus-laden email (becuase they don't want to waste bandwidth doing it). I am only getting these messages on one of my email accounts. I'm wondering, are these emails coming from my machine, or is it possible their headers being spoofed?

[ManxyGal]

I don't know if Mi¢ro$oft has automatic scanning set up for Hotmail accounts or not - my Hotmail account went inactive about 2 years ago. I can tell you, however, that getting those "you have a virus" messages does not mean that you in fact do have a virus. Here's why:

• Most of the mass-mailer worms being circulated now practice address harvesting and spoofing. That is, they go through address books and email folders (including inbox, sent items, and any other folders) to collect email addresses, and then when they send themselves out, they fake the data in the "from" field of the email headers. In other words, if your dear friend Rush Limbaugh sent me an email, and copied you and Sean Hannity and Matt Drudge on it, I have all 4 addresses in my inbox in that message. If I then get infected with one of these worms, it will send itself out from my computer... and it will come to you with, say, Sean Hannity as the source... and it will go to Rush Limbaugh with, say, you as the source. So you all start sending each other "you have a virus" emails, and you all start furiously scanning your PCs and not finding anything, while I sit over here with my PC continuing the problem. Neat, huh? That's why I always disable the "auto notification" feature in the antivirus software now, both at home and at work.
• If that isn't enough of a headache, some of the viruses themselves now come masquerading as a "mailer daemon" or system administrator virus notification. That's what the "Mimail" worm does - you get an email with an attachment that claims to be from admin@yourdomain.com indicating that your email account will expire and telling you to click on the attached file (which pretends to be a webpage, but isn't). [That one failed where I work because everyone knows that I am the Administrator and I always use my personal account for all notifications. As a matter of fact, there is no such account as admin@mydomain.com. But it worked at many, many places.]
• If you have decent antivirus software on your PC (Norton, Panda, McAfee, or similar, and if you make sure it's updated very frequently (like every 2 or 3 days), and if you run periodic scans, then you are likely in the clear. If so, just delete those messages like the annoying spam they've become