Destroy Him as You Will, the Worm Always Bounces Up; Execute Him, Expropriate Him, Starve Him Out En Masse, and He Reappears in Your Children ^[1]

Keywords Internet, Computer viruses, Soldering, Preservative

Since I last wrote in these columns, there have been several new viruses and worms put on the market . I ve not been directly threatened by any of them, although my anti-virus utility does block one or two attempts per month to install one or the other of them. However, someone who has my e-mail address on his computer has been infected and has retransmitted the virus to hundreds of other computers. Many of these have bouncing rejection systems. These work by sending a message to the originator stating that the attempted message contains a virus and was not delivered. I have received literally many hundred such messages over the past couple of months, all of them purporting to be from persons I ve never heard of. These bounce messages are a niddering pest, and sometimes exceed, in number, more than the combined wanted messages and other spam I receive.

There is absolutely no point in bouncing virus-laden or spam messages because it is invariable that he who receives them was not at the origin of the cause. They must uselessly take up a considerable amount of Internet bandwidth. Worse, if you take drastic action to eliminate them unread, you might miss a useful bounce , one where a genuine message has not been delivered for whatever reason. In between...