Yet Another Journal

Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans,
cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of.


 Contact me at theyoungfamily (at) earthlink (dot) net

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» Sunday, September 21, 2003
No Inoculation Needed

I do not have a virus. As we read further on this thing, we realized a lot of people, including one friend, were getting tons of these spam e-mails supposedly generated because we have a virus. People were complaining in newsgroups that they did not have the virus but were getting tons of e-mail.

But just to be sure, we followed the instructions on Symantec's site for getting rid of the bugger: first James did a simple Regedit move that was cut and pasted from Symantec's site. This was supposed to generate a "value" in the startup registry key which we were supposed to delete. However, everything in this particular key was already supposed to be there. There was nothing extra to delete.

We then followed the rest of the instructions: kept the computer in safe mode and ran the virus scan, which had been updated 2 hours earlier.

Guess what, no virus.

I have managed to configure the filters in Eudora to switch all these spam e-mails to the trash, but it means I have to leave my computer on 24-7 so my e-mail box won't get clogged up. There is no way for me alone to stop these messages at the server level. That should be Earthlink's job, yet only a few of these messages get into the known spam folder (which doesn't count for my 10MB storage space).

Other folks have noted that it's "tapered off." I'm still getting 80-90 messages every three hours.