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30-A Maine Antique Digest, May 2015
E-MAIL TIPS AND
SCAMS
by John P. Reid,
jreid@dca.net- COMPUTER COLUMN #317-
It is all about e-mail this month.
Archive E-mail
Many of us save received e-mail mes-
sages for years as transaction records
or for their information content. I have
e-mail to and from companies written
about in this column, fellow collectors,
antiques shop customers, and research
sources.
Most e-mail software allows filing old
messages indefinitely. However, the mes-
sages are not saved in a standard format.
Each program uses a proprietary format,
sometimes quite complex. When buying
a new computer, recovering from a com-
puter failure, or switching to a new e-mail
program, these files may become unread-
able. Retaining archived e-mail depends
on the type of e-mail service used. There
are three cases.
Case number one is employees of gov-
ernment, corporations, or institutions who
use the organization’s e-mail system. All
their incoming and outgoing e-mail is
archived, often for years. It may be used
as evidence in legal matters. The work-
ers themselves may have to prove their
right to see their archived e-mail. Most
antiquers are not in this class and have
arranged for their own e-mail service.
There are two kinds of service: webmail
and e-mail clients.
Case number two is webmail users.
They actually log on to an e-mail provider
website to read or write mail. Webmail
services include Google’s Gmail, Yahoo!
Mail, AOL Mail, Microsoft and Apple
cloud mail services, and many others.
Once read, a message is usually deleted
by the recipient. However, webmail ser-
vices provide folders where old messages
can be stored indefinitely. The recipi-
ent must deliberately move the message
to such a folder. There is a limit to how
much can be stored, but that limit is huge.
Case number three is user’s software
called an e-mail client, which is installed
on the user’s computer. The software
contacts the e-mail service, which may
or may not have a webmail service as
well. Mail is downloaded and processed
totally on the user’s computer. Examples
include Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft
Outlook, Windows Mail, Apple Mail,
SeaMonkey, and many others. The user
can move any message to one of a group
of computer folders with descriptive
names. They will be there so long as the
computer lasts.
Saved e-mail client messages will be
included in routine computer backups but
seldom in readable form. There are add-
ons for several popular e-mail clients that
will export word processor-readable cop-
ies of saved messages. For example, the
popular Mozilla Thunderbird has the free
ImportExportTools extension. This exten-
sion created a folder containing 18 years
of my genealogy correspondence in a few
seconds. It is now stored on a CD with
other family documents.
Here is one final tip. Case number three
users should do all e-mail archiving on
one specific device such as a desktop or
laptop computer. If e-mail also is read on
devices such as tablets and smartphones,
be sure those devices cannot delete
messages from the e-mail service. The
account settings for most mobile e-mail
apps include a setting saying “Delete
e-mail from server.” Set it to “never.”
That way, a message read on a phone or
tablet will still be available for archiving
when later read on a computer.
E-mail Scams
Every e-mail user is familiar with seem-
ingly innocent but possibly malicious
messages. We all know not to open unin-
vited attachments or download unidenti-
fied files. Even clicking to view a picture
might cause harm. Here are a few e-mail
scams seen over the years emphasizing
these warnings. Most are still around, but
new ones are being devised each day.
The so-called Nigerian scam is the clas-
sic. Politically correct people call it the
419 scam. That is kind of a joke because
Article 419 in the Nigerian Criminal Code
defines fraud. The scheme says the sender
has a huge amount of tainted money to
secretly get out of the country (not nec-
essarily Nigeria) and needs the recipient’s
help with the transfer. The helper is prom-
ised rewards but is asked to send a modest
amount of money to prove good faith. It
is amazing that this fraud still flourishes.
Maybe Barnum was right.
“Phishing” is the most common e-mail
scam. It arose on AOL in the 1990s when
the name was coined. The sender mas-
querades as a legitimate business, often
with text and logos copied from a real
business’s website. Recipients are told
that there is some problem with their
account—an e-mail provider is running
out of message storage space, a credit
card payment is overdue, or some other
pretense. The recipient is asked to click
on a link in the message and log in with
a password and other sensitive personal
information to “verify” or “correct” the
account. If the mouse pointer is hovered
over the link, the link URL displayed in
the status bar may look real. The usual
object of phishing is either identity theft
or withdrawing your money. However,
many of the big database breaches in
the recent news started with a company
employee becoming a phishing victim
and giving away personal access codes to
the company database.
There seem to be a lot of e-mail mes-
sages lately asking the recipient to take
care of an attached unpaid invoice. Some
of these are phishing, but many are trying
to get an accounting department to pay an
imaginary debt. Large companies have a
hard time verifying that an invoice reflects
an actual order placed by the company.
The recent flurry may be the result of a
successful postal mail scam in the sum-
mer of 2014 widely reported in the news.
Using the name Scholastic School Supply
(not connected with children’s publisher
Scholastic, Inc.) fake invoices for books
were sent to 70,000 schools in 27 states.
Amounts were either $388.50 or $647.50.
It looks as if e-mail scammers recently
took up the scheme.
A personal example illustrates a dif-
ferent danger. I take a Zumba class for
fitness, so I am a fan of the music of
Shakira. An e-mail was received last
year with the heading and logotype of
the major Latin American news syndi-
cate, similar to our Associated Press. It
informed me that Shakira Isabel Mebarak
Ripoll (her full name) had been killed in a
horrible automobile accident in her native
Barranquilla, Colombia. The details were
said to be available by clicking the link.
By coincidence, online news reported that
Shakira was being interviewed that same
day in Manhattan, more than 2000 miles
from Barranquilla.
Not wanting to click on the link, I
examined the message as raw text. The
link appeared to be a Microsoft Word
document. The usual fraudster’s trick
with Word files is to tell the reader that his
or her copy of MS Word is “outdated” and
VBScript should be turned on. It then tells
how to do this. The truth is that Micro-
soft sets VBScript off by default because
it could maliciously take over a computer
with access to memory.
An imitation phishing e-mail like the real ones.
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Main Street
or Your Street—
Maine Antique Digest
Delivers
Subscribe Today!
Call
1-800-752-8521