Non-native English?

[Michael Quinion]

> Somebody from the address <MikeGHRC at aol.com> keeps sending me a
> message (shown below in its entirety), with an attached file. I'm
> afraid to open it for fear of viruses, and I don't even know what
> an "IE 6.0 patch" is, but the reason I'm writing is to ask if
> anyone else sees this as something that a native speaker of English
> would not say.

The message, with its attached file, is an example of one type of a
nasty virus (strictly a trojan) called Klez. The message sizes are
typically about 130Kb, so it's a real hog on bandwidth. The size is
accounted for by its having its own mail server built in.

It has the particularly nasty habit not only of sending itself to all
the names in your address book (if you use MS Outlook) but of sending
such messages faked up to look as though they come from people other
than yourself. I get about 20 copies a day from infected subscribers,
plus several bounces from systems which think I have sent copies out.
(So the person at AOL may not in fact be the sender.)

The various subject lines and text messages in it are drawn from a
small thesaurus, which do seem to have been written by a non-native
speaker of English.

Do everything possible to stop it from infecting your system, mainly
by not clicking on the attachment. It can be cleaned by standard anti-
virus software programs, if their data files are up-to-date.


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>