figby.com

Attention system administrators: Your well-intentioned but misguided attempt to warn me about viruses is driving me insane.

You see, the newest viruses forge the sender’s address. And when I say "newest", I mean virtually all of them in the last three years. So when you send a "Virus ALERT" message to the sender’s address, you’re not reaching the infected victim. You’re reaching an innocent party–which often turns out to be me–and creating a nuisance almost as significant as the original virus.

I use a number of very old email addresses that are all over the web, meaning I get lots of viruses and that my address is often forged as the sender. I use ClamAV on my server to eliminate the virus messages, and it’s so effective I rarely see a virus message at all. However, I get 10-20 pointless virus warnings per day. Since they’re all different and don’t contain a virus signature, these are almost impossible to filter.

So, if you’re an email administrator, or an anti-virus software company, please don’t compound the problem by sending out useless warnings. Thanks.