This is not necessarily pointed at you Jill, yours just happened to be the message I replied to. It is VERY IMPORTANT that everyone understand that these viruses don't just pull names from your address book anymore. You can have absolutely NO address book at all, and the virus will still find HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of email addresses to send to.

Any time you browse a page on the internet it is cached in your computer for possible use later. The virus will search your cache and pull out all these email addresses and use them. For example, if you are reading this message, you will have my email address in your cache because it is posted above.

Another place the virus will get email addresses from is your email files. Many people file emails away for future use. The virus will search these files for email addresses also.

What I am trying to say here is that whether you keep an address book or not, a virus is still going to find plenty of email addresses on your computer to send itself to. I don't believe that not keeping an address book will significantly hamper a virus program or be of much help to your friends or family.

As Jill says though, the days of not bothering with anti-virus software are long past. If you connect to the internet you MUST buy and maintain virus protection. If you don't you are being very inconsiderate to the rest of us and I don't appreciate it one bit.

Greg