Annoyed by other people’s anti-virus software

This is a rant.

The recent MyDoom viruses have been causing me annoyance. Not because my system can be infected by them, because it can’t – it’s not Windows. Not even because I have received a large number of emails containing these viruses from infected individuals – I haven’t; as far as I can tell, I haven’t actually received even one infected message in this way. (Actually, that might not be true, they could all have been caught in my spam trap … but I haven’t noticed any.)

So what am I complaining about?

Well, it’s the continual stream of “The message you sent to bob@place.com was infected with a virus – please check your system!” I have had loads of these.

This is how it works:

• Clueless individual receives a virus-infected email and opens the attachment;
• The virus code starts to run – it begins generating new email messages to propogate itself. To do this, it chooses two email addresses at random from the infected user’s address book – one of these addresses will become the “From:” address for the message, the other will be the “To:” address;
• In many cases, the infected person has me in their address book, so my address goes out as the “From:” address, even though I’ve had nothing to do with the message;
• For some recipients (the “To:” users), their corporate anti-virus software returns what it assumes to be a helpful message saying that I have sent their poor user a virus-infected message.

So, you see the problem. The corporate anti-virus system is replying to the supposed-sender of a message which they know has been generated by a virus that fakes the sender. Not even remotely helpful and probably doing more harm than good since it generates lots of unnecessary email messages. In fact, some of these “you have sent us a virus” messages are more than just a simple notification – they are bordering on full-page advertisements for the anti-virus software in question. Given that this message is commercial and is, by definition, going to someone who has no previous relationship to the company, I expect this meets most people’s definition of spam.

I have now decided to write to postmaster@wherever.com whenever I receive one of these notifications. I am asking them to configure their system so that these notifications are not sent. It is an option on every setup that I am aware of, but often defaults to ‘on’ simply because the anti-virus companies realise that this is good advertising. (“Hey, Bob, this FooSoft Anti-Virus seems to be detecting loads of viruses – why don’t we use that??”) If the notification is particularly ‘spammy’, I am copying my messages to the anti-virus company too.

OK, rant over … but if you’ve got me in your address-book – make sure your system is clean!

Updated Monday 02.02.2004 19:24: The article Martin refers to in his comment is this one and it’s discussed on Slashdot here