This is in response to the article "UB Wards Off 'My Doom'" printed in the Feb. 9 issue of The Spectrum. A close friend of mine fell victim to the My Doom virus, and it completely erased all of my friend's C drive.
I am writing this letter just to warn students to be careful when downloading e-mails. It was said in the article that programs like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express download e-mails and their attachments automatically. There is a way to change this.
What essentially happens is when you click on an e-mail, Outlook gives you a preview of that e-mail. To do so it must download the contents of that e-mail. This can easily be changed by going to the "Options" section in you program, then clicking on the Read tab (for the xp version of windows) and changing the option that automatically downloads e-mails to your computer. You will not be able to "preview" the email, but you can avoid the download and thus prevent your computer from crashing.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
