Hello everybody!
You probably know about that but I keep receiving emails about Microsoft critical patch & virus update with attachments in english and recently in spanish language. I enquired at Microsoft and they said they never send such emails and they certainly contain viruses. I use oultook 2000 is there a way to block these emails?? and how come using Norton to scan my emails it does not catch that ??
Thank you for your advice and help.
Martie

Quite possibly if you have the latest updates from norton....it could be a new virus they havnt got updates out for yet.

You are right...M$ never does send updates of any kind through email...neither does antivirus for that matter.

Check for updates on your office software..
In the windows update window...click office update.
There is a big patch that will block those attachments...you still get the email but are unable to open the attachment
(you will get something like.."outlook has blocked the following unsafe attachment virus.exe)

As far as blocking who the email comes from....likely won't work because most of those emails the virus spoofs (fakes) the from address.

Just keep deleting them.

A few good rules to go by...

If you dont know the person who sent it...delete it
MS does not send attachments...delete it
Antivirus does not send attachments...delete it
If you do know the sender...check with him/her to see if they did mean to send u attachment and what is the expected result if it is opened.
Save attachments to disk instead of opening them, scan em..if all clear..then open em.
Most people have no reason to accept attachments such as: .exe, .pif, .scr, .bat, .com, .vbs, and many many more but those are the most common carriers of viruses.
Also any attachments with double extensions are most certainly viruses...eg: funny pic.jpg.exe
Windows will ignore the .jpg (picture) and run the .exe (executable)

Hope that was some help

Hello,
Thank you for the advice and tips. I did not think that it was save to save attachments to the disk instead of opening them and then scan for virus.
Thank you, guess we have to be real carreful al the time!
Martie

You can save em to disk as long as you DONT open em...Make sure you scan them first before doing anything with them. If you have your antivirus set to scan incomming email....it should pick it up right away and stop virus from doing anything.
I also forgot to mention above to DISABLE your preview pane...you know...when you click the email once and it shows the text in the botom half of the screen?...ya want that off....when you go to your inbox you should just see the list of emails.
Tools> options> other tab> preview pane> make sure it is off> apply> ok.

I dont know about outlook 2000 but with outlook XP if you right click on the email once you get a menu popup....in the menu should be view attachments...if you mouse over "view attachments"...the file name and extension should show...(.eml will not)
From there you can decide to delete the whole message or not...If the email has attachment like the ones listed above...just delete it.
To get rid of the deleted emails in trash safely...right click on deleted items folder, empty deletedd items...are you sure? yes.
job done...infected email gone.
Depending on what you use for antivirus; if you have it integrated into outlook (there will be av button) click the email once and hit the scan button, av will automatically quarentine delete clean the attachment or ask you what to do.

Hi,
I have norton av 2003 and have the option of scanning in & outgoing emails enabled. I don't think I have the av button integrated in my outlook (or couldn't find it!) I just find it surprising that I did not get a "warning" message when I received these faked MS messages. I'll be careful! Thanks again