Independent Thoughts

Many of us, i am sure, do get emails which indicate us that our so and so bank/web account need immediate attention trying to lure us to check it out. Unfortunately still there are people around who get fooled more than twice due to their ignorance or unawareness and get trapped into these schemes of mailers. I am going to explain just 3 points here which may be helpful to many of us. Oh Yeah! I know you are smart and you don’t need advice, but i guess this may help your friend or close one.

1:- Use text based email reading application or switch on your options to read email ins text rather than HTML. Almost every email reader has this option. Reading emails in plain text may be sometimes an issue, but 90% of the emails floating around between people can be read in simple text. Reading an email in html, though gives you rich graphics and colors, beware the spammers also comes to know that you have at least opened his email and now he knows the spams he sent out last week had your email as a valid one and help him shortlist his big list to attack with the next step. Also switch off direct image display as there might be remote images (also called beacons) which actually inform the spammers about you being winner in the first step to provide your existence to him.

2:- Avoid opening an email with a attachment which you are not expecting. If at all you cannot resist what gift you got in the email, do not open the attachment to download if the email is not from the know source. A simple precaution may help you save in the long run. Just ask yourself , if you don;t know the sender why you are getting an email with attachment? Why would someone send you something if he/she does not knows you.

3:- Last advice, if you had already ignored the last two point, at least do not click on any link which might open a spam/fishing website. The link in the email may look correct but just don’t click it, if you do want to visit the internet address sent to you in email open a new browser window and then manually type the website address unless you are too lazy to type and want to to go easy way by clicking and end up being a fishing trap.

below is one the sample email i got which is pure fraud, study it and see if you find anything wrong with it.