Posted by Eric B. on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 12:11PM :
In Reply to: Re: paypal - ebay emails beware posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 11:42AM :
Just clicking on the link can trigger bad things, for example they may have a way of tracking what E-mail address you are coming from, and now they know that address is valid.
I was told to stay away from anything you think is spam, Phishing, etc. Just delete and move on, unless you want to report it to E-bay etc.
Also, if you get spam and they have a "click here to remove me from your list" don't do that either, as that just shows them you are a valid E-mail address.
This does not hold true for things you signed up for, like E-mails from Best Buy about new deals, etc.
My general advice about E-mail is:
Have a web based account (Yahoo, Gmail, etc or check your account online instead of with Outlook), so even if you do hit a virus laden E-mail by mistake it can not download to your computer without your permission.
Never post your E-mail address on the web or in a forum without something in it to stop the crawlers from finding it, like mine is listed on this site as townwagon@(remove this)yahoo.com. A real person can figure that out, but a computer program most likely will not bother.
Never download any attachments for which you do not know the source.
Turn on your show common file types on your computer, things like .jpg, .txt etc can be hidden by new versions of windows, but then when you see a .jpg it still feels safe.
A common practice has been to attach a file with a name like funstuff.txt.exe to an E-mail, then when you see it the "common" ending of .exe is left off and all you see is funstuff.txt and it seems safe to you.
All in all, just use your head, if it seems wrong, it most likely is, and doube DOUBLE check anything you suspect as Phishing at the website you use, DO NOT follow any links in the E-mail.
E-bay, PayPal, your bank, etc will all have any major warnings for you when you log into their site like you normally do, if there are no messages that match the E-mail, the E-mail is SPAM, and should be deleted.
Good luck, and stay safe!
Eric