With so many newer viruses spoofing the From address, these alerts create more traffic on already over loaded email systems and do nothing to help the situation, especially when the alerts contain the original message and the infected attachment. In too many cases, it was responsible for more infections, as people received the NDRs (Non-Delivery Responses) back and looked at the attachment to see what they supposedly sent.

Let's hope next week is less exciting. Four new patches were released recently for the Windows XP operating systems, make sure your system is up-to-date.

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.