The other day we featured a novel way of taking advantage of the economic stimulus package and today we found another, similar scam. This one does the same trick but this time the focus is education.
Join us, if you dare, for another sordid journey into the world of semi-legitimate marketing.
This started off as a simple post about a no-brainer way to spot unsavory web sites, however, in the process of researching another post, we found out that this issue isn’t quite as cut and dried as we thought.
Unlike a postal address, which contains several pieces of information (name, house/apt. number, street, city, state, ZIP code) about where postal mail should be delivered, an email address only provides two pieces of data: the mailbox ID and the domain name.
These are neatly separated by the @ sign with the mailbox ID to the left and the domain name to the right. If your address is username@OnlyMyEmail.com then your mailbox ID is username and the domain name is OnlyMyEmail.com.
There are really only two ways to keep spam out of your in-box:
Of all the confusing and convoluted mail server rejections commonly in use, “Currently not permitted to relay through this server” causes more Support tickets for us than any other. Worse yet, it’s not even an error that we use, so we find ourselves constantly trying to coherently explain what someone else’s mail server is saying.
If you don’t respect your online identity, nobody else will and before long your in-box will rot and fall off. At least that’s what our mother told us. She also told us to eat our vegetables that we’d go blind if we forwarded email to ourselves.
We usually take what Mom says with a grain of salt.
The term “dictionary attack” usually refers to a method for finding a password by trying a limited (but still very large) set of passwords to see if any of them work. In the spam lexicon it means doing the same thing with email addresses.
Spammers generally don’t hand write spam messages (any that do are probably not very successful). They use computers. The software they use to generate bulk e-mailings can also vary parts of the message and the most basic variable in a spam campaign is the “To:” address.
Web browsers, or browsers for short, aren’t strictly an email related topic. However, the browser has become an important tool to most email users because of the proliferation of web-based (browser-based) email clients. Many email users have never used a stand-alone email client and have always processed their email using a browser-based client.
The best known browsers are:
You are almost certainly using at least one of these.
