Open your mail carefully today!

The loonies are out in force today. There's a particulary sneaky virus going around. So far I got five emails today from

webmaster@mortyschiller.com
support@mortyschiller.com

and a few similar return addresses, all from my mortyschiller.com domain and all with variants of the same message:

Subject: Your Email Account is Suspended For Security Reasons
or
Subject: YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT ACCESS IS RESTRICTED
or
Subject: Email Account Suspension

Then there's a message:

We have suspended some of your email services, to resolve the problem you should read the attached document.

And, you guessed it, the attached document is a zip file called "email-info.zip" and it's packed with code.

Of course, I knew they were fake messages. For one thing, mortyschiller.com is me. There is no "webmaster" or "support" dept. Just your truly. And by now I can smell fake emails. So, no, I didn't open the attachments. Didn't even open the emails. I monitor all the email on my server before downloading it with a free program from PC Magazine called MailCall. It shows the first lines of your messages while they're still on the server. And it shows it in plain text. If I see a bunch of code, I just delete it before it gets to my second line of defense. (If you can still get MailCall 1.1, I would get that. I had some minor problems with version 2.)

Keep your powder dry!