Actually, if you don't use your real e-mail address on Usenet and have friends with a clue (who aren't stupid enough to use OE), you should never get any. If you start getting them, change your e-mail address and ensure the above precautions. Otherwise, you're doomed forever.
I am down to one a day, and since I use a free email account setup just for newsgroups, they are isolated and don't affect me.
Carolyn
On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 13:02:00 -0600, someone wrote (with possible editing):
Ok, fair enough I guess. Well, I use Agent or Dialog for email as well as usenet posting. I don't use OE for anything.
Nonsense. I use Outlook and don't get any junk mail or viruses. I use an email account on usenet that I don't check and could care less about, and I watch who I give my active e-mail account with.
I still can't believe there are any folks here that don't understand the simple fact these messages are coming to you because you subscribed to a newsgroup. Mailbots harvest addresses on Usenet every day. It is the reason 99.99% of the users are getting spam and or virus attachments.
As others have said: Use a junk mail account (such as your hotmail) as the reply to address. I repeat: Use a junk mail account. Never never ever use your primary isp address on this or ANY newsgroup. By having a junk mail address as your reply you can still check for personal replys from this or other groups.
One other plus to these webmail services is the attachments will not execute unless you specificly open the attachment.
-- Bill (whos mail.com account is full of spam or virus attachments right now).
I use Eudora for email, and I have the option to choose "skip messages over ". I set mine to 50 or 60K. This way I can get small pictures, but not be bogged down with large attachments, and have to wait hours to get my mail.
The way this works, is I get 50 or 60K of the mesasage. In other words, I can read the text, or if the text is also huge, I only get the first part of it. If I choose to get the rest of the message, I simply check-mark the message to download the whole thing. The headers always tell the name of the attachment, and if it is anything besides a picture, I simply delete the message.
You can choose any size you want to download, but I have found that 50 to 60K works best for me.
I imagine other email software allows this option too, but I only know Eudora, since that is all I use.
Notice I said OE. Outlook and Outlook Express are two completely different animals and while I don't think Outlook is much better, it doesn't have the same virus-magnet features as Outlook Express.
BZZZT - wrong! If you use OE at all, there's no difference if your addy is real, you're always accepting HTML scripting, and if there's a virus or trojan in that script, you're gonna get got.
You know how in Agent you sometimes see all that that comes in some newsgroup posts? If you were an OE user, that would be (A) a browser window popped up on you or (B) some crap added to your system.
The OE liability of blindly accepting HTML script applies whether or not you use the auto preview window (or whatever they call that 'feature'); the way OE is written, HTML script is executed as it is received, in mail AND/OR in newsgroups. Whether the results are immediately displayed or not is the only difference.
Assuming the virus/trojan comes as a separate attachment, you're correct; otherwise, BZZZT - not in the case of OE! See above.
The HTML poke vulnerability also applies to the MS IE browser. You can get infected/attacked as long as it is on your machine; whether you use it or not, it's always open for business. Haven't you heard of MSBLAST?
But thanks for playing!
...
Uhhh, no.
Tools / Options / Read / Read all messages in plain text
HTH.
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