Gunni
join:2005-12-06
Bethesda, MD | What am I dealing with here? End of the year cleanup of my Gmail account and I find, way back on 13 August 2011, this email in my Gmail Sent folder:
»dl.dropbox.com/u/1597869/No%20mo···ress.pdf
Here's a shortened URL: »liten.be//891iK
The red line-outs hide my email address.
This purports to be an email from me to me with a link to a .ru site. When Googled I got a hit on McAfee warning that web reputation analysts found potential security risks with this site. Use with extreme caution.
Should I abandon this email account and open a new Gmail account?
Is this a one-off thing and don't worry about it?
Is there any action I should take other than ignore it (I already reported it to Google)?
Many thanks and Happy New Year to all |
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 nwrickertsand groperPremium,MVM
join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL
kudos:7
 ·AT&T U-Verse
| said by Gunni:Is this a one-off thing and don't worry about it?
Yes, that's it.
And expect more of these "one-off" things. It's the way of the internet.
If you want to avoid ever receiving that kind of mail, here's how to do it:
Step 1: Create a new email address. Use a random generator to create it, just to make sure that it is an email address that is unlikely to ever be guessed or found in a spammer's dictionary of email addresses.
Step 2: Never use that email address. Never send mail with it. Never tell anybody what it is. Never post it anywhere.
Admittedly, that makes the email address useless. But that's the way with email. You cannot use it without some risk that spam will come to that address, and some of that spam will be obnoxious or will sound threatening.
The easier method is just a matter of learning to tolerate some garbage mixed in with the email.
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AT&T Uverse; Zyxel NBG334W router (behind the 2wire gateway); openSuSE 12.1; firefox 9.0 |
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Gunni
join:2005-12-06
Bethesda, MD | nwrickert, like your sense of humor and thanks for responding.
I was hoping that would be the answer.
I wonder, however, why if someone could fraudulently send an email from your email address to you, they would not also use it to send phishing emails to others using from that email address.
I don't think such was the case as I have never received any emails from correspondents alerting me to that.
I have, OTOH, received emails I recognized immediately as phishing scams, from correspondents of mine. I wrote them back, they corresponded with their email providers and discovered their email accounts had been hacked. (Each sheepishly admitted to rather weak email passwords.) |
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garys_2kPremium
join:2004-05-07
Farmington, MI | reply to Gunni
It's 9.9% likely a one-off thing and nothing to worry about. If it was me I'd change the password anyway. |
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nwrickertsand groperPremium,MVM
join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL
kudos:7 Reviews:
·AT&T U-Verse
| reply to Gunni
said by Gunni:I wonder, however, why if someone could fraudulently send an email from your email address to you, they would not also use it to send phishing emails to others using from that email address.
I have email automatically sorted into mailboxes as it arrives (based on simple criteria from the headers).
One of my mailboxes is named "fromme" which is "from me" without the space. I created that mailbox because I am sometime careless replying to mail where I am on the "cc:" list, and I finish up sending to myself.
It turns out that I get some spam - one every few weeks - in that "fromme" mailbox.
Forging the sender address is easy. Spammers figure that the mail is less likely to be blocked if the sender address is from the system they are sending to.
Don't trust sender email addresses, particularly if the mail looks suspicious.
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AT&T Uverse; Zyxel NBG334W router (behind the 2wire gateway); openSuSE 12.1; firefox 9.0 |
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