Ever been affected by a computer virus? Recent projections indicate that the loss in revenue terms suffered by businesses worldwide this year, due to computer viruses will approach $16 trillion. (That's $16,000,000,000,000). The amount of time which will be wasted has been projected at approaching 40,000 human-years.

One of the most common routes through which a computer virus will infect your computer, is through receiving an infected email. The world of computer viruses changes constantly, and some of the tips your mother gave you about viruses probably don't apply anymore. Specifically :

• Only open emails from people you know
  NO GOOD - Many modern viruses will transmit themselves to email addresses found in the address book of the infected computer. This means that you could very well get a virus from someone you routinely get emails from.

• If you receive a suspicious looking email, don't open it
  NO GOOD - There are new types of infected email which can infect your computer even if you don't open the email

• Don't use the address book
  NO GOOD - Many modern viruses also scan the Temporary Internet Files folder, and will grab email addresses from any web pages you've recently visited

Room 101 recommends that any computer connected to the internet be protected by means of Anti-Virus software. There are a number of available programs, some commercial, some freeware. However, in many cases, you still have to deal with the annoyance of receiving an infected email attachment, and the headache of trying to decide who sent it, and what to do about it.

SOLUTION - Room101's "filtered email" service is an excellent way to drastically cut down on the number of infected attachments you receive. Here's how it works. You route all your incoming mail through our servers, and we do a quick automatic check on any attachments there might be, before delivering the email to you. Most viruses come in the form of "executable"attachments. With Room101's filtered incoming mail service, if someone tries to deliver one of these to your account, we bounce it back to the sender, asking them to resend it as a ZIP file, a format which protects your computer because the file cannot be set to execute automatically. In 99% of cases, the person whose computer sent the email won't recognise what's been sent, and will be alerted to the dangers of computer viruses. If the person really did send you that email, it's probably because they're a software developer who routinely use executable attachments. They'll know how to resend the file to you safely. NB - If you are a software developer yourself, this service probably isn't suitable for your needs.

This won't interfere with your normal work, even if you need to receive a lot of attachments, because all the most common type of attachments are not filtered out by this service: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Adobe PDF, GIF, JPEG, ZIP, text and HTML still come through OK. Word and Excel viruses can still get through to your PC as we don't filter out Word and Excel attachments, but this service will cut down on annoying random viruses by around 80 - 90 %.