More “You sent a virus!” garbage going around. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even look at most delivery failure notices, which means I could easily miss errors about mail I really did send.

I got ticked off enough this time that I wrote back to the return address on the warning, matching the tone and structure of their message as closely as possible:

An invalid virus notice was found in an Email message you sent. Your Email scanner recognized a virus as W32/MyDoom-O but did not take into account the fact that this virus always uses a fake sender address.

Please update your virus scanner or contact your IT support personnel as soon as possible as you are sending bogus virus warnings to third parties whose systems are not infected with the virus. This runs the risk of causing unnecessary concern among the less tech-savvy (and extra calls to tech support about the nonexistant virus they fear they have). I would recommend reading up on the phrase “crying wolf” as well.

I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this takes the cake:

Sometime last night I received three copies of the same notice from some system in Brazil. They had written their virus warning in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML without cleaning up all the extra junk, and made it the only part of the message… in Base64 encoding!

If you’re going to send any kind of diagnostic notice by email, you want it to be as simple and widely readable as possible. That means plain text (not HTML or Base64, and certainly not both!) It also means if you do want to use HTML, at least clean it up and include a plain-text alternative. For all you know it’s going to be read by some admin logging into a GUIless server through SSH over a modem connection on a hotel phone line!