Email Virus Attack

I have a mail box that is attacked heavily by virus emails, more than 250 email, anyone else is facing this now?

I get over a 1,000 a day, these not much that can be done about it.

Viruses now scan the entire infected persons computer for email addresses in text files, web pages, addresses books, etc. You just have to be careful where you leave your email address.

The only solution I have had to do to cut the amount from over 2,000 a day is to get rid of all catch all email accounts and those that get allot of viruses and spam sent is to delete the mail and send an auto-responder back saying the email address is no longer in use and directing the person to an on-line form if they urgently need to contact me.

Yes, but if I just completly remove an email addresses to this site listed in the software etc. then people will not be able to contact the site at all.

At least this way when a legitmate person trys to email the site they get back an auto-response letting them know a valid way to contact the site through an online form. Otherwise they may just think that their email is ignored or it maybe an important issue and the person has no valid way of contact me.

Getting rid of catchall accounts helped me a lot. Don't bother to send a response back as in my situation, if a valid user sees a kick-back, they look up the proper email address.

Also, upstream virus blocking by the web host - like spamhaus, spam assassin, etc. helped a lot.

I use Outlook 2003 and Norton Anti-Spam on the local PC. Going to let the Norton Anti-Spam subscription drop as Outlook catches 99% of the spam that hits my pc and Norton Anti-Virus catches all the virus emails.

I get about 40 spam's a day, and maybe 1 virus email every few weeks. Use a couple of dozen email addresses. Most of spam/virus emails go to two email addresses - the one used for my major isp, and one that I've been using for about 10 years. The one I've been using for 10 years used to be on web pages as a "mail:to" link, and I also used to post to news groups with it.

Now, I never use mail:to links - only web forms -  and I post to news groups using a hotmail account that deletes all incoming mail. some people claim that url encoding a mail:to link keeps the email address harvesters from gettin your address, but I don't think it's a great leap for a spam harvester to look for an encoded @ instead of a character one.

EDIT: Did a test for a client a while back who wanted his email address in text instead of using an image of it linked to a form. He got a spam within an hour of putting a test email address on a page. I've read of people who got a spam within 10 minutes of posting an address.

Edited by dpyers