If you were to ask people if they felt vulnerable to phishing scams, they would most likely tell you, “No.” However, if phishing emails were not profitable to someone, our inboxes would not be filled with them.

I get a lot of phishing emails, and for the most part they are for companies and services that I don’t use. That in itself is a dead giveaway that the emails are bogus, but occasionally I will get an email from my own bank, or paypal that cause me to stop for a moment and look a bit closer.

The first thing I always do is see where the link goes. This is a good practice get into. The problem with these URLs is that the first part of the URL, the subdomain, is formed to look legitimate. However, if I hover my cursor over the link, I will see the real destination of the URL, instead of just what the phisher wants me to see. Notice the text in the yellow box is where the link will take me if I click it. You can see that the http://adwords.google.com part is the same, but continue looking past that to the right, and you will see that that is simply a subdomain to u40o36.cn . In this particular example, this is a Chinese top-level domain. I just want to make it clear to everyone that no matter how “official” the subdomains look in the URL, it is the top-level and second-level domains that you should be aware of.

A good practice is to avoid clicking the links in emails such as these. If you need to log into any online account, you should type the address to that account yourself.

One other note: don’t allow software that is supposed to protect you from such scams to cause you to become less vigilant. No protection is 100%. Stay aware.

Today Google unveiled a new and useful feature for Gmail called Custom Time. Custom Time makes it easy to backdate your emails for those times when you may have forgotten to send an email or simply did not reply in a timely manner. Another great feature is the ability to mark an email that you sent someone as “Read”, so that your email doesn’t simply sit in their inbox without being read. Now your recipient can’t deny having read your email.

What’s the catch? You only get ten custom-stamped emails per year.

:)

You know the annoying “You’ve got mail!” that AOL says when, of course, you’ve (you, not me) got mail?

I was setting up Mail.app on a user’s new laptop one day, when she asked me if it would say “You’ve got mail!” when she gets new mail. Ugh. I told her no, but that I might be able to make it do that. So here is an Applescript that will save to file whatever text you enter, in whatever voice you choose.
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It’s when I see something like this, that I start to wonder, “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if people were required to take a test, before operating a computer or using email or the internet.”

Seriously, shouldn’t everyone be informed that they should not actually “unsubscribe” to all the emails they receive? Shouldn’t they know how annoying it is to forward every email to every person in their address book?

The unfortunate user belonging to the picture at the right, eventually just changed their email address. I can almost assure you that their inbox is in practically the same condition now with the new address.