Someone should have the guts of suing MS for abusing the Internet's resources through negligence. If a corporation or an individual were to willingly send billions of emails to all sorts of people and through all manners of accounts and networks, in such a way as to severely strain connections' bandwidth and machines' storage space or processing power, said corporation or individual would eventually have to face justice. No spammer has ever been as much a nuisance as the viruses which MS's negligence, or “calculated stupidity”, has allowed to exist. Email viruses are, after all, MS's very invention, deliberate or otherwise.
I run Unix everywhere, so I have no direct damage to fear from the viruses. But our server computer at the ENS is striving to deliver thousands of copies of the unwanted virus, sent to all recipients indiscriminately; and all that CPU time is wasted. I received several hundred copies myself, because my email address unforunately happens to be in hundreds of spammers' recipient list. And not the copies of the virus itself are the most annoying, for these can be automatically deleted: the worst are the bounces I receive from copies of the virus which were sent in my name (forged, of course—obviously I haven't sent any myself). Thank you, people from Redmond!
Those who run Unix might find the following
.procmailrc fragment useful, incidentally:
# Stupid virus
:0
* ^Subject: (R[eE]: *)*(Approved|Thank you!|Wicked screensaver|Your application|Your details|My details|Details|That movie)$
{
:0 B
* See the attached file for details
/dev/null
}
Self-note: check whether Sobig comes up at the top of this week's Google Zeitgeist page when it appears.
Update: Because of mail delivery queue saturation everywhere, some mails may (randomly!) take a long time (i.e. one or more days) to reach their destination. Please expect this.