Posts Tagged ‘email clients’

What if someone says they sent me a message but I didn’t get it?

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

We commonly receive questions from users who tell us an expected email has not arrived, and they don’t know how to go about finding it.

Fortunately, with proper information and the right approach, it’s not really that hard to track down missing email messages.

Like snail mail, email follows a path from the sender to the recipient and problems can arise along the way. When a package or letter hasn’t arrived, it doesn’t make much sense to start yelling at the mail carrier; instead you have to start at the beginning and follow the message from point to point.

Following the chain of possession, the most common causes of missing email are as follows: more »

Tags: email, email clients
Posted in All About Email, Message Control | Comments Off

Wells Fargo Bank Security Alert – Phishing Example

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

This phishing attempt is a nearly perfect textbook example so we’ve decided to use it to highlight some of the usual characteristics of this type of email fraud.

If you arrived here after receiving a copy of this message you are right to be suspicious. We’re not sure what triggered your suspicion but here’s something that should definitely set off your inner fraud detection alarms . . . more »

Tags: email, email clients, fraud, phishing, phishing invitation, spoofing
Posted in All About Email, Phishing Lessons | 2 Comments »

Masonry Grant?! – Email Fraud

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

It’s not every day that the All Seeing Eye comes out in the open to bestow grants on random email address owners. Usually the Eye works from behind the scenes, which is why we thought this deserved some attention:

Freemasons have selected you to receive 2.5 million dollars and you don’t even have to join them! more »

Tags: 419 scams, email clients, fraud
Posted in Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons | Comments Off

What’s A Browser?

Friday, June 18th, 2010

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.

Tags: browsers, email clients
Posted in All About Email | Comments Off

How To Stop Downloading Duplicate Emails

Monday, March 15th, 2010

If your email software suddenly starts downloading duplicate copies of the same emails, there are four common causes to consider.

1. Your email software has more than one “Account” or “Profile” or “Personality” configured to download messages from the same email POP account. As a result, your software downloads one copy for each Account/Profile/Personality.

Symptom: All email from all senders are downloaded two or more times; but only up to a certain number of copies, which remains the same… ie: two copies of every email or three copies of each.
Solution: Manually review each Account/Profile/Personality within your email software to make sure that the same POP account isn’t listed more than once.

Tags: email clients
Posted in All About Email | Comments Off

Forwards: The Other Unwanted Email Category

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

One of the most annoying types of unwanted email is the mass forward. You know, the kind where one of your “friends” sends a heart-warming story about a dog or a list of interesting “facts” about bananas to everyone in their email address book. (More often than not that friend also sends everyone’s address to everyone else too but that’s another story.)

The reason this stuff is so annoying is that you can’t just block the person sending it because, most likely, they are a friend and might actually send you something you’re interested in at some point. On the other hand you really don’t care about an amber alert notice that was proven false five years ago. So, if you can’t block them, what can you do?

Tags: Bcc, email clients
Posted in Message Control | Comments Off

You’ve received a postcard – Active Virus

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Today’s new virus campaign comes in the tried and true category of the bogus email postcard.

Volume is high, beginning early this morning. So far all subject lines contain:

You’ve received a postcard

In each case the sending address is spoofed to match the recipient’s email address. This is done in order to try and bypass spam filters that allow you to enter approved senders or that automatically allow email from addresses in your address book.

Tags: email clients, spoofing, virus
Posted in Message Control | Comments Off

Can Anyone Send Emails Claiming To Be From Me?

Friday, January 29th, 2010

The short answer is yes. Anyone can forge the sender (From) field of an email and have it claim to be coming from pretty much any address they want.

At first glance you might think “That’s horrible, why do we allow that to happen?” The truth is that it’s rather common, and you might even do this yourself, though for entirely innocent reasons.

Tags: email, email clients, forging, smtp, spoofing, white list
Posted in All About Email, Spam Tactics | Comments Off

Spammers Use Word-Joiner Characters to Encode URLs

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Spammers use a variety of tricks and tactics to try and hide the URLs that link spam emails to their spam hosting websites from the various email filtering programs that are trying to catch them.

Many, if not most, of these tricks depend on the fact that today’s browsers (which are used by email programs to display html emails) are extremely forgiving when it comes to non-standard and broken html.

Tags: botnet, email clients, encode, url
Posted in Spam Tactics | Comments Off

Should I Leave Messages On The Server?

Friday, January 15th, 2010

By default, email client software programs will delete all messages from your mail server right after downloading them. This means that when you click “Get New Messages” or “Check Mail” (or whatever you do to see if you have any new messages) your email client connects to the server where your mailbox account resides and copies all of the messages from the server to your computer. When it finishes, it removes the messages from the server so that the only copies of the messages are the ones downloaded to your computer (or phone or PDA if that’s what you used to check mail).

Tags: email, email clients
Posted in All About Email | 1 Comment »