On E-mails, Hoaxes, and my Silliness

This week I checked my GMail account (using IMAP in Outlook, of course; this is a wonderful feature and has resulted in me missing less mail thanks to being able to look at my college, Hotmail and GMail inboxes in one go), which is the address I give to family members and extended relatives.

Besides the usual family updates (including a rather well maintained spreadsheet of my current family tree to about 4-5 generations back) there's always a clutch of forwarded e-mails. You know the drill as well as I do, the jokes, the sometimes pretty series of pictures and sayings about life, and of course, the virus/crime warnings.

It's the latter I want to write about. Having used the Internet for about a dozen years now, with it becoming more and more closely tied to my life in general as time goes by, I've learned that most of these urban legends are hoaxes. I usually don't take them too seriously, trusting my e-mail scanner to do its job and weed out any real viruses as I open the messages.

Yet when I found a warning from my aunt about a virus attachment to a message titled 'Merry Christmas' which claimed to be verified by snopes.com, and saw that the next mail I was about to read carried that very title, I reflexively deleted it with a right-click.

A few seconds of calm later, I realised I had little to worry about:

• Visiting the Snopes page concerned, I found out that said virus was a mass-mailing worm easily caught by pretty much any antivirus out there.
• I should have smelled a rat when the warning claimed the virus destroys the Zero Sector of a hard disk. There is no area on the hard disk called the 'Zero Sector'. There is a Sector 0 (being the first sector) though. What one should worry about is a virus that takes out the MBR. And most antivirus programs will not miss something trying to modify that.
• And the clincher of my momentary stupidity: Outlook let it download. AVG is plugged directly into Outlook and scans all e-mails before letting them into my sight. Given the first point above, it means the message I deleted was probably clean.

I recovered it from the Trash folder and read it to confirm this point. It was clean. It was a message I would delete after reading, still, but it was clean.

So why this long post which essentially means very little? The reason is simple: I want to.

Have a Merry Christmas!

(and don't be fooled by too many hoaxes this festive season!)

(BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA! ;-) )