Stopping E-mail Viruses
posted Wednesday, April 20, 2005

There are many viruses still circulating via e-mail. Most e-mail viruses are propagated when the e-mail recipient opens an e-mail attachment that is intended to infect the recipient’s system. It is for this reason that our mail server removes e-mail attachments that are capable of spreading viruses. These are attachments with extensions of .scr, .exe, .bat, .pif, .cmd, .zip, .com, .hta, .reg, .vb*, .msi, .msp, .lnk, .js*, .ws*, .ocx, .dll, .hlp, .inf, .job and .cpl. As a result of the mail server filtering messages, your inbox may contain messages which state…

"A message filter removed the following attachment(s) from this message: (name of attachment)"

This means you received an e-mail with an attachment that had an extension from the previous list and our mail server deleted the attachment to help prevent the spread of e-mail viruses.

To receive restricted attachments:

1. have the sender rename the attachment before e-mailing it to you, for example, rename “program.exe” to “program.doc.”
2. ask the sender to put the original name in the body of the e-mail message
3. once you receive the attachment, save it and rename it to the original filename