New spam low (slightly OT)

[Victor Steinbok]

The main reason I use a stand-alone mail client is that I want more
control over my email than webmail makes available. The reason I don't
use Outlook is because I want something more secure. Given those two,
you can generally inspect the links in incoming messages. Even those
that look authentic often have links redirected to an obviously forged
domain. In case of messages that are ambiguous (all links redirect to
the same server that appears to be someone doing work for the company),
I prefer to check with the alleged source of the mail to see if the
message is authentic. Of all the banks that send out mail, only American
Express and Citibank occasionally send messages with links that are not
in the main domain. And those are easy enough to distinguish. Generally,
if there is a redirect (e.g., the text of the link obviously refers to
more than one domain), it's phishing. They really should be fairly easy
to spot. I also use multiple email accounts so if a bank message appears
under an account that is not used for that purpose, it's obviously fake.
Then it's easy to spot a similar message in other accounts.

There are plenty of tips for the paranoid--or the prudently skeptical.

    VS-)

ronbutters at AOL.COM wrote:
> But some of the phishers are very sophisticated and convincing. I recently got one purporting to be from CitiBank. All that gave it away was the final two letters of the website: "do"; that is the Dominican Republic, notorious as the source of online scams of various sorts. Caveat lector.
>
>

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