Did I really send somebody a virus ?

At Subvenion, we get asked this all the time, so we though we would create a page specifically to answer this question.

We will use colors to help illustrate the explanation, Blue for you, Red for the Virus infected PC and Green for a 3rd party.

Sombody, probably known to you, gets infected with a virus.

This virus checks that person's list of contacts and extracts two email addresses, yours and a third parties

The virus then creates an email, attaches itself, and sets your email address as the sender and the 3rd partyies address as the recipient and sends the message out.

The 3rd parties mail server receives the message and identifies it as being a virus.

The 3rd parties mail server then attempts to return it to the apparent sender which is listed as you

You get an email back from the 3rd party that seems to indicate that you sent them a virus.

At Subvenion we're doing our part to minimise this silly problem by simply deleting messages that contain a virus, and not returning them to the aparent sender.