If an online scan reports your system is clean but you are receiving email alerts indicating you're sending infected messages, you're the victim of many virus' capability to use any address it can find as the From address. You can't do much about it, unfortunately. You can confirm the infected messages came from someone else's computer by checking the Internet header for the sending IP address, but most of the time, it's impossible to determine who is infected or to alert them to the infection. (In Outlook, use Options from the View menu to see the header.)

After receiving several infected messages a day for the past week, it's obvious to me that many people aren't taking this advice seriously, including my own sister. Please don't be like her. Learn more about protecting yourself and Outlook from viruses by visiting http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/antivirus.htm. And remember, if you receive any virus laden messages from my address, they really didn't come from me.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's coauthor of Word 2002: The Complete Reference (Osborne, 2001) and Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (for Wrox Press). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.