Will adding a bogus entry to my address book stop viruses from emailing?

No.

Flat out, no qualifications, no. Does no harm but does no good.

OK, it might do some harm, in a backhanded way.

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The theory is that malware which sends email does so by using your address book, and as it walks through your address book it will stop trying as soon as it encounters a failure to send. The technique then is to create an entry alphabetically first in your address book that any malware would encounter immediately, causing it to fail and go no further.

The theory is wrong.

In short:

• Most malware no longer bothers with your address book, so doing anything to your address book is not nearly as effective as you might think.

• Any malware that does use your address book may or may not do it in alphabetical order.

• Any malware that does use your address book isn’t going to stop on a single error. It’s going to plow through no matter what.

Perhaps there was a virus that behaved this way many, many years ago, but malware has gotten very sophisticated. Simplistic solutions like this simply aren’t going to have any noticeable effect. You’re just as vulnerable before as after.

Speaking of vulnerable, I did say it might do some harm, didn’t I? Here’s how…

You may think that you’ve taken a step to protect yourself when you haven’t. You may then think you don’t need to take additional steps, when in fact you still do.

You might fool yourself into making yourself a bigger target.

Don’t do that.

There is simply no substitute for taking the steps necessary to protect yourself from malware. The “usual litany”:

The list could go on, but those are the basics.

And you’ll notice that putting a bogus entry in your address book isn’t on it.