Ordinary Gweilo

I’m getting rather bored with the latest virus (MyDoom). I have received a few of these email messages containing attachments, and also the follow-ups claiming I have sent out messages containing viruses.

I am intrigued by the logic behind this one, which seems to be aimed at people who will open an unexplained attachment from an unfamiliar sender even when it does not promise anything exciting. It may appeal to wannabe geeks because of the technical gibberish (“The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment) in some versions, but other than that why bother opening the message?

I looked carefully at the first one, didn’t recognize the sender, and deleted the message. Then I noticed something on Shaky’s site about the virus, and discovered that I was right to delete it. Now my virus checker has caught up, and tells me that there are nasty things in some of the incoming emails and deletes them for me.

The messages claiming I have sent viruses are bizarre, because they refer to an email address that I never use for sending mail, and come (with one exception) from people who I don’t know. So I ignore them.

The problem with email, as I have mentioned before, is that it holds a horrible fascination for many people, and they waste a lot of their time reading messages that they should really ignore, and (presumably) opening attachments and clicking on links. Which, of course, is why companies send spam emails – even if only 0.01% of recepients respond it’s still worthwhile.