Last night I received a virus through e-mail. I am usually very careful. I am able to view my E-mail on my server and delete before downloading to computer. This one came saying that it was Support for Objection Mover. It has munched some of my Windows operating files. I'm awaiting now a friend who will help me repair my computer. I'm surfing now on my secondary computer. I do not know what virus this is, I can only tell you that it came with the above Inforamtion about Objection Mover. Beware of this e-mail if you receive it!!!!!!! Liz Pope Dreamspinner

Thanks for the heads up.

As much as I hate virus protection software, Norton AntiVirus 2002 does a good job of catching e-mail viruses, both in-coming and out-going, before they can do any harm. Be aware that there are e-mail viruses out there, especially for Outlook, that don't even need to be opened in order to infect a system. What a shame. Thanks for the warning!! BeatYourSoul

Over the past few days I've received several emails with 3D/Poser related subject lines - what made me suspicious was that I didn't recognise any of the senders' names, the subjects were familiar but not actually relevant to me, and all the emails were around 130k.

My advice... when in doubt, trash it :)

• gps

Anyone with Outlook should be running virus protection - more than half of viruses made these days are Outlook targeted. Shame this happened to you - good luck in restoring your files! Lyrra

This appears to be the BugBear virus. What is does it send itself to addresses in the infected computers Outlook address book. It takes subject lines from already existing e-mails, adds a false sender address that is made up from the addresses in the address book or from already existing e-mails in the inbox folder. As an example, if you have the addresses a@a and b@b in the address book, it might put an address a@b or b@a as the sender address of the mail containing the virus. Obviously, there is someone that you have comunicated with that is infected. Since the sender address is false, it's difficult to know who it came from. As always, have an updated virus software running on your PC, it will protect you against this.

Bugbear exploits a security hole that MS have patched - go to Windows Update and you won't run it (or variants) simply by opening the email to which it is attached, though you still mustn't open the attachment.

I'm running Norton AV 2002, and it appears to get most things.......except the ones that contain the message "This is a very excite game. I hpoe you would like it" and variants on that, such as windows patches and websites. Personally, if i'm ever in the slightest doubt, i delete it.

Thanks, for the comments, but I DO NOT use Outlook. I use Netscape's mail function as I run both browsers at the same time but avoid Outlook like the Plague. This one arrived on my server with the name and subject line as I stated. I can enter my mail while it's still on the server and delete a whole mess of junk e-mail. I only brought this one down to my computer because it said it was support for Objection Mover. It could have come from someone else's infected machine, but this thing is so virulent that it jammed up my computer within 20 minutes. I was in the midst of downloading the lastes DAT files for my McAfee because I had a feeling the e-mail was infected with something. Then it locked up everything. When I reset, it had already munched Himem.sys and Windows would load no further.

Have you ever tried "Mail Washer" as an added protection? http://www.mailwasher.net/download.php

Dreamspinner, it doesn't matter if you run Outlook or not, it's the person with the infected computer sending viruses to you who is running Outlook. If you receive the virus, you will still end up in trouble, since viruses has a nasty habit of creating unforseen side effects. If you're not running Outlook, the only thing you can be sure of is that you will not distribute the virus further.

And even if you don't use OE/IE other things on your system will call their functions (but not Netscape I'd assume) so it's still prudent to get the updates after the early adopters have hasd a chance to test them for you.