My mother got this as a "chain mail", and passed it on to me:

As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your
computer it heads straight for your e-mail address
book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus
infecting all your friends and associates.

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.

Here's what you do: first, open your address book and
click on "new contact", just as you would do if you
were adding a new friend to your list of e-mail
addresses. In the window where you would type your
friend's first name, type in AAAAAAA. Also use address
[1]AAAAAAA@a.aaa

Now, here's what you've done and how it works:

The name AAAAAAA will be placed at the top of your
address book as entry #1. This will be here the worm
will start in an effort to send itself to all your
friends. But, when it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA,
It will be undeliverable because of the phony e-mail
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. Here's the second great
advantage of this method: If an e-mail cannot be
delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box
almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an e-mail
telling you that an e-mail addressed to AAAAAAA could
not be delivered, you know right away that you have
the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps
to get rid of it!

If everybody you know does this then you need not ever
worry about opening mail from friends.

Snopes refers to this too http://www.snopes2.com/computer/virus/quickfix.htm, they don't think it works. Provided you use it only to warn you that you HAVE a virus then ok, but it won't stop your computer sending out to all addresses which is what some people think.

Edited to add that you last sentence about not being afraid to open attachments is dangerous, they could still be infected.

You could also use a program like Eudora or something other than Microsoft Outlook, which is what most of the viruses are written for.

This is the same thing as the !0000 message. Here's what Symantec have to say (scroll to the bottom of the page for their comments and recommendation).

I agree with ladymacb. Try a less targeted e-mail program. A worm will find itself with nothing to do if it enters my Outlook Express address book. There are no entries in it.

The Thunderbird e-mail program is my preference.

Ah, I can now see why it would help if you don't HAVE an email address, that makes more sense and could be why the first 'address' in mine reads !0000 with the email address of 'wormalert', now I know how it is supposed to help.

I still would never open an attachment without checking it out first.

In the days when I used Outlook Express I had the !0000 address in my Address Book for a while. I thought that even if it didn't do any good it at least wouldn't do any harm. Then I read this and took the phoney address out.