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Virus Emails

Viruses (also called worms, or trojans) are programs which are introduced to personal computers and which could have the capacity to severely damage the individual machine and/or cause major disruption to mail networks.

The most common source of infection is by opening an infected attachment sent by email, and the systems most at risk are Windows systems using Microsoft mail programs.

A virus will usually attempt to infect other systems and there are a number of methods which may be used. The most common is by mailing itself to addresses found on your computer (eg address books or received mail messages). Other viruses may infect files held on central servers, or probe for unprotected machines connected to the internet.

They can also be introduced from infected documents collected from the network, on floppy disks or CDs or from infected websites.

Protection from viruses
Information on protecting your computer(s) from viruses.
Returned emails
Information on the phenomena of "Returned emails". Autoreply or bounced message from addresses you've never sent to.
Additional hints
Further hints on avoiding virus email.

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