I keep getting messages back from administrators of other networks,
saying that they received a virus message from my e-mail account and
deleted it. Yet, nothing gets picked up when I do a Norton Anti-Virus
scan (after doing automatic update). How can I ensure I don't send out
any viruses?

Hi there.

If you have the latest updates for your Norton Anti-Virus, it is most
likely not your computer sending out the viruses.  Very commonly,
email viruses (virii?) will choose a random email address from an
infected computer's address book and use that to *forge* a From
address (maybe even yours, though it's not your machine sending it
out.)

The following site explains this phenomenon well:
http://ask-leo.com/archives/000065.html

Excerpt from above site:

"Let's use a concrete example: Peter's machine gets infected with the
MyDoom virus. In his address book are entries for friends Paul, and
Mary. Paul and Mary have never met, have never exchanged email, and do
not know each other - they each just know Peter. The virus on Peter's
machine will send email with the virus to Paul looking like it came
from Mary. Paul may wonder who the heck this Mary person is and why
she's sending him a virus, but she was never involved."

Good luck with this, and unfortunately, there isn't terribly much that
you can do beyond hope that others will also invest in anti-viral
software as you have.

--Joey

Searching strategy: email virus replies administrators

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Clarification of Answer by joey-ga on 09 Jun 2004 13:00 PDT

Hi there,

I'm sorry you didn't find my work satisfactory.  I believe that I did
explain the phenomenon on this page and provided a link for more
information on it.

If you were looking for the additional information to be pasted here
as well, unfortunately, against your wishes, the Google Researcher
guidelines prohibit me from doing so.  They state, "Researchers must
not copy any material from any Web site or other source in answering
any Question. Researchers may quote or paraphrase short passages of
text, but only if necessary, and only if the Researcher includes in
the answer the author and source of such materials (including a link
to the Web site, if any)"

Thus I believe I answered your question, included as a quotation
another author's example of the situation, and then provided a link to
additional details.

In any case, I hope you now understand the virus concern.  Please let
me know if I can be of more assistance.

Its not useful to send me off to another site to get the answer. If
another site has the correct answer, you should include it in the the
body of your response.

http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

This is Mc Afee site. You can download that tool and run it on ur
system. It'll remove somewhere around 45 viruses and I believe your
viruse is from these. These r the viruses that came into being in the
recent past.
Whatever it is. i believe this tool is effecient enough to remove it.