On Fri, Jul 16, 2004 at 01:33:47PM +0530, Parameshwara Bhat wrote: > > This week I have been receiving numerous mails from > ***@[***]redhat.com all 174 or 173 KB and with chinese looking junk > characters in the body and either a zip or pif attachment. I haven't > clicked on the attachemnt though Good. Do not click on junk, clicking or previewing junk mail triggers little one pixel validating triggers which get you more and more junk mail. A good text based reader like "pine" or "mutt" can save you a lot of pain. If use a browser based tool 'Netscape', 'Mozilla', evolution or another, configure it to not auto preview mail. > I presume these cannot run on my Fedora box. This is true 99% today but tomorrow who knows. > I also receive similar mails from various other sites as well all > similar in body and attachment. Where could this be coming from ? Clearly it is a virus, worm or spammer attempting to do something to your system. The From: header is often forged making it look like it came from some normal place. > Does anybody know of a mail-client which can be taught not to > download suspicious looking mails ? It is important to understand how these messages are being delivered to you and how you are collecting mail. If you are collecting or reading mail from an account at your ISP check to see if they have filters. For the dial up folks this may prove to be the most important tip. If your system is running sendmail and the infected files are being delivered directly there is a long list of things to get correct. In addition virus detectors and spam filters can be setup. Which mail agent are you running 'sendmail', 'postfix' or another. When in doubt 'isolate' the message it can take a week or two for the virus folks to identify some of these. If it is an infected message delete it. -- T o m M i t c h e l l /dev/dull where insight begins.
