American Health Enterprises

The latest round of virii attempt to get you to open the attachment by tricking you into believing it is your email that is being returned to you and have a subject like:

RETURNED MAIL from MAIL DELIVERY SUBSYSTEM or
SYSTEM REPORT or MAILER-DAEMON
DELIVERY STATUS NOTIFICATION (FAILURE) also
UNDELIVERABLE:HI or simply HI or HELLO or TEST.

Each of these emails have an attachment which contains a virus, known as MyDoom.

But I know what you're going to say. You're going to say "But Colleen, I really need to know if one of my emails actually did not get delivered." and I totally agree. So for all my savvy outlook express users out there, lets talk about a real failed email delivery.

The Sender will always be: Mail Delivery Subsystem
The Subject will always be: Returned mail: delivery problems encountered

Will there be an attachment: Yes, your original message will be attached. Now what we need to do is to peek at this email without opening it.

"Why that's just crazy talk Colleen!" you might say. Yup it's crazy but it works.

Hilight the message you want to check. Right-Click (click using the right mouse button NOT the left) and you should see a pop-up menu similar to the one on the right:

Now use that left mouse button and select the properties option. A dialog box similar to the following will appear and we are going to click on the details tab up on the top.

After selecting details you will see the details dialob box and we now need to click on the message source button in the lower right hand corner:

After selecting message source you'll see this lovely screen full of exciting geeky details!

Between you and me, only John finds the text in bold exciting *rolls eyes*. We're going to skip the bold text and concentrate on what follows:

I can see that the message is actually from helpdesk, so that's good. I can see that there was actually a delivery problem. I can see who I sent this particular message to, ooga_booga. And I can see it's a permanent failure because the user ooga_booga is Unknown to the email server.

Silly me, I mistyped the email address, it's actually ooga_booger and that's why this message was returned.

So there you are, a way to peek at those pesky virus ridden emails without opening them so you can be sure your important mail has been delivered.