I wish I had a £1 for every hoax virus warning that people
forwarded to me. It's not often I treat these warnings with the
urgency that those that sent me them do. Partly because I am less
vulnerable to most being a Mac/Eudora user. But mostly because
bitter experience suggests that the majority of such virus warnings
are hoaxes. As was the case with an e-mail I received this morning.
So, I did my homework and then replied to all recipients in the
distribution list with the following e-mail in an attempt to prevent
the warning being propagated further:

>From: Duncan Smeed <duncan@smeed.org>
>Subject: Re: Fw: virus
>Cc:
>Bcc:
>X-Attachments:
>
>At 11:40 am +0100 18/4/01, [snip] wrote:
>>just passing this on
>
>This is a hoax. Please DO NOT pass it on. It's always a good idea
>to check one of the hoax-busting sites before propagating such
>e-mails. See, for example:
>http://service1.symantec.com/sarc/sarc.nsf/html/Virtual.Card.for.You.html
>
>Usually a Google search will throw up a number of sites that contain
>news on a so-called virus such as this. For example:
>http://www.google.com/search?q=A%20Virtual%20Card%20for%20You%20virus
>
>HTH,
>
>Duncan