As I always write back, "There is no chance of getting a virus by reading email". Why do I get so worked up about this? The warnings are as much a virus themselves. You cannot get a virus from reading email ( see below ), but the people that don't know this panic. "Oh no!", they think and immediately mail it to as many people as they know. If they know 20 people and of those 20 only half pass it on to another 20, you suddenly have 200 emails cluttering up the net. And that's being conservative, the internet has millions of users. I can probably remember more than 20 peoples email adresses off by heart, I could spam hundreds!

Secondly, email itself cannot carry a virus. Email is text. ASCII characters. Each email contains details of where it's come from, where it's going, and a message. A computer reads each character as text to display, not as a programme to run ( a virus can only infect when it's activated or run ). There are 256 ASCII characters. You can try it out by running edit under DOS. Holding down the alt key and typing a number between 0 and 255. Try it. For example ALT 189 produces a little border character and ALT 13 generates a new line character.

However, files sent with email ( attachments ) CAN carry a virus. People send documents, pictures, cute little programmes and other stuff. All of these can be infected with a virus. If you do not have a good virus checker I would recomend that you never touch an attachment to an email message. Jump to ANZWERS Search and look up "anti-virus software" if you would like to download a good anti-virus programme.

And next time that you get a panic spreading, net cluttering, time wasting, message about yet another email virus, do everyone a favour and correct the sender.

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