Delete friendship screensaver viruses with Outlook Express 6

Dennis Faas's picture

This Sunday, I received the "friendship4u" (W32.Yaha.E) email virus about 30 times. I couldn't believe how this little bugger of a virus kept emailing itself to my mailbox. Thank goodness I have a virus scanner in place and Outlook Express 6 which do a decent job of protecting me from dangerous email attachments.

Although this is a somewhat effective combination of software to combat an email worm virus, it didn't stop the fact that the virus kept showing up in my INBOX under Outlook Express. Every time I received the virus, I would have to weed through good emails and delete all the virus-infected ones manually.

Not (so much) any more! I decided to make an Outlook Express 6 Mail Rule that would automatically send the virus to my Deleted Items folder as soon as it detected certain text in the body of the infected message.

Note that this Mail Rule that I'm about to share with you will only be effective for SOME of the W32.Yaha.E variants. This mail rule will not stop your system from being infected; it will only save you the hassle of deleting some of the infected emails by automatically placing them into your deleted items folder.

With that said, let me explain how you can do the same.

Since some of the W32.Yaha.E viruses sent to me contained the text 'Enjoy this friendship Screen Saver', it would therefore make sense to create an Outlook Express Mail Rule to delete any incoming emails that contain this text. Caveat: The line of text "Enjoy this friendship Screen Saver" is only present in SOME variants of the email virus, so this Mail Rule will not work for all W32.Yaha.E viruses. Am I repeating myself?

Here's what the message rule looks like (in text) under Outlook Express 6, " Apply this rule after the message arrives; Where the message body contains 'Enjoy this friendship Screen Saver'; Delete it "

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