If I am understanding correctly you may not be able to be infected with the virus if you are not using your own computer but that doesn't mean you can't be credited with sending the virus to someone.

From a post above, if I understand right, If someone is, all of a sudden, infected with the virus, the fact that they have opened and read your post or an email from you or sent an email to you would put your post or email into their internet caches or filing cabinet as it is called on AOL. Incidentally, using a computer at a Kinkos would make you more suseptable as your information is stored on a public computer that with it's nature of use is a bigger target for viruses. As the virus goes through the infected computer it would scan caches as well as address books and preference files for other ISP services that might be on the system. In other words looking through all the common files or locations where email data can be saved. Once the infected computer has been searched by the virus the program will compile the list of harvested email addresses in another file.

I am a little unclear here but as I understand from some experiences before with what I have received from others and read on the Norton site, many of these viruses will then take randomly selected file names and data from such applications as Word, Excel or from files like download files in your browser and send those files along with the email addresses to a USENET board where they can then be retreived by a computer running the virus. Or they may just be generated in the infected computer and sent out from there. What then happens is that the virus will take a file from the infected computer or maybe just the file name. It will compile that with a letter generated with an address (maybe your address) from the harvested list of addresses and attach a virus file named with the harvested file name from the infected computer. Lets say the harvested file name is something like chiptraders.doc . Mimicing the routing data from info retreived from the infected computer from say an email containing your address the computer disguises itself as though it was sent by YOU and attaches a file name that might look like it is legit. This fools people in the same circle of contacts where your name came from, say chippers, into thinking that the file is a legitimate file sent by a familiar person that they can trust. Once someone falls for the scam and opens the file they get infected. The computer harvests more data from their computer and may leave a time bomb in it's place when finished. This way at some determined time, immediately or maybe on a date of special significance, the program runs itself and trashes your HD or certain files that will leave your computer messed up.

Anyways, now days the people on the senders name of the mail is rarely the person sending the virus out. Some time ago I received one of these where the routing data seemed to have identified a third party where the info may have actually been sent. That name was different than the individual on the Sent By: line of the email. However, things may have changed since then as the last one I received actually had routing data that included the same name as the sender and even included a signature line on the letter that would have appeared to be by the sender. I was clued in that somethinig wasn't right though since the signature was the email screen name and not the persons name. The chipper who appeared to send the mail, I know from other mail I received from him, didn't normally sign his mail with his screen name. He would usually sign with his real name. Obviously, I said to myself, the virus took his email address and whittled it down to what appeared to be a signature and tried to fool me.

One last twist on this whole thing that I read on an AOL board that discussed scams and viruses.

Similar in operation to what I discribed above, there are Viruses or whatever you would call them that would go through a hard drive and harvest email addresses. Then they go through document folders and find documents or data like Word documents or email files or Excel data. The program then takes that file and emails it to all of the names in the address book and email addresses retreived (Harvested) from the HD. Imagine your bid information for certain projects being sent to your competitors or the Payroll lists from HR being sent to all other employees in your company. Or maybe a love letter to or from your boyfriend/girlfriend being sent to your boss and supervisors.