I apologize in advance to all who I am about to antagonize.

The above suggests you can stop worms propagating by adding a fake contact named AAAAAAA to your address book. Don't believe it. It's a hoax wrapped up in techno-speak to make you think it's legit. Let's take a look at the whole thing in order to show you in just how many ways it is plain wrong:

"…when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates.”

Partially true, so far. Some mass mailing worms do raid your email program in order to propagate. But many of them do not. Many of the current crop of worms contain their own SMTP server, so they can handle their own email sending without bothering your email program. This gets around a patch MS released for Outlook. They search your hard disk for email addresses wherever they lurk and use them to propagate.

“This trick won't keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has gotten into your system.”

True, false, false. True, the trick won't stop your computer from getting infected. False, it won't stop the worm from using your address book (Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, etc.) to spread. False, it won't alert you to the fact you're infected.

“Now, here's what you've done and why it works: The "name" AAAAAAA will be placed at the top of your address book as entry #1. This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends.”

Actually, no. What you are looking at when you are looking at your address book is a sorted list. The physical order of your address book entries will probably be totally different that the alphabetically ordered list on your screen. Why would the worm start at the top of your address book? The worm will start wherever the virus writer has determined it will start. It might simply use all addresses beginning with 'M' or every third address, or take the addresses in the order they were originally entered into the address database. Worm writers don't abide by some set of rules that says, "Keepest thou thy worm in alphabetical order."

“But, when it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered. If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not be infected.”

Well, this might be the case if you're dealing with a truly dumb worm. But I haven't yet heard of any worms that are this dumb. All a worm needs to do is ignore the invalid address and move on to more juicy pickings in your address book, and that's what those I’m aware of do.

“Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to A could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system.”

Commonly true, but it doesn't necessarily work that way. When or whether you get a "bounced mail" message depends on a whole lot of factors.

Again, to all who are offended by my critique, permit me to apologize.

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Eudaimonia