The PC Informant » Email

The spam you don’t see

Vic Laurie — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:58:55 +0000

You may think you get a lot of spam but apparently it could be even worse. Many ISPs apply spam filters that block mail from ever being delivered. According to a report at ZDNet (UK), the European Network and Information Security Agency says less than 5% of spam is actually delivered. That may be true in Europe but I wonder about the US. I get a ton of Viagra mail at Yahoo. It’s true that it goes into the spam box but I still have to delete it.

Email scams and the multi-billion dollar ripoffs

Vic Laurie — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:27:12 +0000

There’s the Nigerian scam, the fake lottery winnings, the phony bank message, fake Facebook friends, bogus account cancellations, greeting card scams, fake delivery messages, phony government agency alerts, the list goes on and on. They’re all email scams; some are hilariously inept, others are ingenious and very clever. They all have the same purpose—to bilk you out of as much as possible. TechRepublic discusses some of the scams to watch out for.

While you and I may think that we’d never fall for one of these, enough people do to ensure that our mailboxes will continue to overflow with bogus offers. The Nigerian scam alone raked in $9.3 billion in 2009 according to the Dutch firm Ultrascan. And the total for all varieties of email fraud must be tens of billions. MaximumPC quotes a figure of $41 billion but I imagine a lot of fraud goes unreported. In any event, online fraud is a growth industry.

Fake Adobe Reader phishing scam

Vic Laurie — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:33:17 +0000

Adobe reader always seems to need security updates and the phishers are playing on that. PC World reports:

A new phishing scam is trying to fool people into thinking it comes from Adobe, announcing a new version of PDF Reader/Writer. The message is making its way into e-mail boxes now, and the real Adobe urged any recipients to simply delete it.

Review of Thunderbird email client

Vic Laurie — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:35:13 +0000

These days I only use web-based email so I have no experience with the email client Thunderbird from Mozilla. However, I thought I’d point out that Walt Mossberg has just reviewed the new version 3 of Thunderbird. His headline is, “New Mozilla Email Is Easier to Use, But Not Easy Enough”.

Any Thunderbird users out there want to comment?

Tips for using Gmail

Vic Laurie — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:25:39 +0000

A lot of people are now using Gmail as their email client. Because I began with Yahoo mail long ago, I haven’t personally used Gmail much but I think it’s worth pointing out that Google has a series of pages with many tips for using Gmail. The format is a little cutsie-pie with talk of various stages of Gmail ninja but there are many good tips.

Watch out for Haiti disaster scams

Vic Laurie — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:06:22 +0000

PC World reports:

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is advising people to be careful when evaluating donation programs related to the earthquake in Haiti as one security firm is already seeing scam e-mails circulate.

People should apply a “critical eye” to requests for financial donations following Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti, which caused an unknown number of deaths and severe damage to the country’s infrastructure.

“Make contributions directly to known organizations rather than relying on others to make the donation on your behalf to ensure contributions are received and used for intended purposes,” the FBI said in its advisory.

Thunderbird 3 released

Vic Laurie — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:45:33 +0000

A lot of home PC users who still use local email clients have found themselves left out in the cold by Microsoft. Outlook Express hasn’t been updated in years. The name was changed to Windows Mail in Vista but not much else was new. Windows 7 doesn’t even have an email client included; you have to download a suite of products with a lot of stuff you may not want.

Probably the best free solution for those who like to download and view email on their own system instead of on the Web is Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Version 3.0 is just out and it is getting good reviews. Lifehacker says:

Thunderbird 3.0 comes packed with fantastic new features, including a new tabbed interface à la Firefox and other web browsers, a beautiful and powerful new search and filtering tool that lets you pinpoint any email, and a totally streamlined email setup tool that’ll get your Gmail or other accounts up and running with Thunderbird in a jiffy.

The download page is here.

Fake swine flu emails

Vic Laurie — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:13:14 +0000

Another scam is circulating; this time it’s fake emails purporting to be from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The phony email claims it is about creating a profile for an H1N1 vaccination program. CNET reports:

The fake alert informs recipients that as part of a “State Vaccination H1N1 Program” they need to create a profile on the CDC Web site. The link in the e-mail goes to a fake CDC page where the visitor is assigned a temporary ID and a link to a vaccination profile that is actually an an executable file containing a copy of the Kryptik Trojan targeting Windows, according to an AppRiver blog post on Tuesday.

How to copy a picture from an email or Web page

Vic Laurie — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:06:39 +0000

I received an email from someone who wanted to know how to copy a picture from his Outlook Express mail. I assume the picture is in the body of the email and not just an attachment. It’s very simple to copy a picture from any HTML formatted email as well as from many other kinds of documents and from Web pages. Right-click the picture to open the context menu. The entries in the menu will vary somewhat depending on the type of document and your browser but among the entries you will find the choices “Save Picture As..” and “Copy” (Internet Explorer) or “Save Image As..” and “Copy Image” (Firefox). Examples of right-click context menus are shown below. If you select “Save Picture As…” or “Save Image As…”, the usual dialog will open where you select the location and name for the picture file to be saved. If you select “Copy” or “Copy Image”, then you can paste the picture into another document in the usual way.

Menu in Outlook Express	Partial Menu from Internet Explorer

Beware the 12 scams of Christmas

Vic Laurie — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:24:58 +0000

The holiday season is big business for everybody, including scammers. In an interview with CNET, security firm McAfee gives its list of the 12 scams of Christsmas. Slightly paraphrased, these are:

Charitable phishing scams
Fake invoices from delivery services
Phony social networking friend requests
Fake holiday e-cards
Fake “luxury” jewelry
Hacked or phony holiday shopping sites
Sites with Infected Christmas carol lyrics
Job search related scams
Auction site fraud
Password stealing scams
E-mail banking scams
Files for ransom

And don’t forget scareware, Nigerian scams, phony lottery winnings, fake Windows updates, etc.