I just put a rather stupid thing on my TODO list. I'm going to start examining the feasability of creating anti-spam rules which recognize the "warning" messages sent by many anti-virus e-mail products.

Viruses are over 99% of the time sent from forged e-mail addresses - the writers of dedicated anti-virus e-mail products should know this. Sending a "reply" warning the "sender" that he needs to clean his computer is pointless at best (it's sent to the wrong person) - misleading scare-mongering at worst.

Warning messages like "SymanTrendee SuperSafe MailBlocker blocked a VIRUS from YOU" are basically just spam. If you are using an e-mail anti-virus product on your mail server, please make sure you've turned off all the "reply to sender" features you can. If you can't disable such messages, complain to your vender - they're using your incoming virus traffic as an excuse to use your e-mail server and your bandwidth to send product advertisements thinly disguised as "warning messages".

During an outbreak, I get hundreds of these "warnings". For me, they're more of a problem than the virus itself because the virus messages are recognized and blocked by my filters.

But what's worst, is that these messages frighten and confuse normal users. It's a relatively common occurance that the AVES support receives questions about what these messages mean, whether the virus scanner failed to protect them somehow. They generally aren't very happy when we explain to them that viruses forge mail using their addresses and e-mail anti-virus programs send them junk-mail in response - and there's nothing they can do about it.

Well, nothing until I've created the anti-spam rules which kill those messages... ;-)