This is primarily for those folks who have email addresses under my hosting account. I just received this message from [Dreamhost](http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?momathome) support:

>Hello UnHappy-Email-Delayed DreamHost Customers,

>Starting yesterday and still going on now our email servers have been absolutely inundated with the “Sober.X Worm”.. causing HUGE mail queues resulting in long delays in the delivery of email to nearly ALL of our clients. See news about the virus:

>[http://news.google.com/news?q=sober.x](http://news.google.com/news?q=sober.x)

>We’re doing our best to filter this virus completely at the server level and will get email caught up as soon as we possibly can.

>If you’re not already using it, now may be a good time to turn on our Junk Mail filter for your domains!

>The virus checker we have on there has been catching the worm effectively.

>Thanks,
>The Happy DreamHost Hates-Windows-Worms Team!

The Sober.x worm is not new. It’s been around for a while. The [Washington Post describes the worm’s activities as follows:](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/07/AR2005120702471.html)

>The worm most often comes attached to an e-mail supposedly sent by the FBI or CIA, claiming that the government has discovered you visiting “illegal” Web sites and asking you to open an attachment to answer some official questions. Microsoft Windows users who click on the attached file infect their computers with the worm, which then e-mails copies of itself to every address found on the victim’s machine.

I have not enabled Dreamhost’s junk mail filter on any domains. Why? It’s not that smart. Chances are real mail will be caught by the filter and the only way to find that mail is to log in via webmail and look for it. Most folks use their choice of email client to check mail, so I don’t want to force them to use the webmail interface.

However, if you do want me to turn on junk mail for your domain (it’s all or nothing per domain) just drop me a note and we can talk about it.

If you’re using Outlook, I’ve been trying out [MailFrontier](http://www.mailfrontier.com) for spam filtering (in combination with Norton AntiVirus). It’s not bad. Up until recently I was swearing by [SpamBayes](http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/windows.html) but it had been losing some of its effectiveness and it was time to try something else.