A virus is a program designed to corrupt (and copy itself into) other programs and alter the way they work. The impact of viruses can range from making your computer crash during certain operations, to deleting important files, possibly rendering your computer inoperable.

These days, most viruses are transmitted over the Internet via e-mail attachments.

A special type of virus, which is actually called a "Trojan Horse," is a program designed to look like it's doing something normal while actually playing havoc with your computer's files. However, unlike a true virus, a Trojan Horse can't reproduce itself, nor can it "infect" programs.

Viruses are programs that can only infect other programs, as well as files containing "macros" (a series of commands grouped together to automate a complex series of tasks) such as Microsoft Word and Excel files.

Computer viruses can be transmitted through Web pages or complex email messages. To be safe, you can configure your email program to not display HTML in email.

Viruses cannot be transmitted through cookies. (Viruses can be transmitted via e-mail attachments, as discussed in How do viruses work.)

1. In Nescape Messenger, click Edit, then click Preferences.
2. Click Formatting.
3. Under Message Formatting, click Use the plain text editor to compose messages.
4. Click OK.

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