Sooner or later you WILL receive an email that contains a computer virus.
Viruses can be spread by infected programs downloaded from the Internet, or infected programs or files can be sent between computers by networks or by email attachments.
In general, you will not get a virus just by opening or reading your email. However, some viruses can infect your computer without any help from you! Here are some facts you should know:
For most viruses that arrive in an email attahcment, they are activated clicking on the attachment. This will either save the file to your hard disk or activate the virus immediately. So how can you tell the difference between good attachments and those that contain a virus? In some cases, you can't.
Most new computers come with an anti-virus program. They can be effective in protecting your computer from Trojan and other types of viruses, but only if the virus definitions are up to date.
An anti-virus program has two components, the program itself, and the virus definitions.
Virus scanners (Anti-virus programs) provide an option for you to limit the types of files to be scanned. The default options are usually sufficient for Windows systems. At a minimum, you should scan all files of type .EXE, .ZIP, .DOC and .SCR for viruses. This takes care of program executables, screen savers, Word documents, and compressed zip files.
The virus definitions are what tell the program how to look for viruses. Since there are new viruses that come out on an almost-daily basis, if your definitions are not updated, eventually your anti-virus software will become useless. You can configure your anti-virus software to update the virus definitions as frequently as you wish (we recommend at least monthly, if not more frequently) and automatically. Check the help file or web site for your particular anti-virus program. It should be free to update your virus definitions as long as the program is current.
If you are not running any anti-virus software at all, we highly recommend that you obtain and install one as soon as possible. There are too many such viruses out there to seriously consider being on the Internet without one for very long.
Finally, you must actually perform a full scan on your system periodically (again, at least monthly or more frequently). Most anti-virus programs are configured to run in the background and scan your system files during startup. You should, however, set up your anti-virus program to run a full system scan (of every file on your hard drive) regularly.