From: M Taylor [mlt@mltweb.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 6:49 PM To: mlt@mltweb.com Subject: Buytrain new year's resolution Taylor, Mike 01/02/02 New Year's Resolution: I will be a better email citizen in two easy steps! One: *** I will never, ever forward email messages until I have deleted the old message headers. Email addresses of family, friends and colleagues can be harvested from forwarded messages and used by spammers, sold to the highest bidder, sent to investment advisors and worse. Next time you feel like forwarding a message, do everyone else a favor and clean up (delete) the old headers first! I've received messages forwarded multiple times that contained dozens of email addresses. Each one you send on is a valid potential customer for the "I've-got-a-hot-pick stock club". Two: *** I will never, ever forward a virus warning until I am sure the warning is valid. A large percentage of the virus and scam warnings circulating around the web are hoaxes. They are invalid, fake, not true, not likely or just plain stupid. Many well meaning people make the problem worse by taking a hoax message and forwarding it to all of their friends and family. "I got it from my mom, how could it be wrong?" It's kind of like hearing someone yell "fire" in a movie theater and then also starting to yell without knowing for sure a fire really exists. During the past few weeks I've had three friends forward virus warnings that all clearly were identified on the anti-virus web sites as fake. When you get one of those messages, don't forward it unless you check it out yourself first. Repeat; don't stampede the crowd unless you know the danger is real. Check out virus and scam warnings at one of several anti-virus and hoax buster web sites. Pick one: http://www.mltweb.com/ec/fraud.htm At the moment, I like Symantec http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/index.html . Open the Symantec page and then search on some of the message keywords. If the supposed virus has a name, search for the virus name. The recent messages I received related to a file named S U L F N B K. Try a search for this word (without spaces) on the Symantec web site and see what it says about this hoax. It's pretty easy. In this case, the hoax instructed people delete a valid Windows file. I know some people who got the message, deleted the file and then asked me what I thought. You can imagine what I said... Happy new year! Mike