Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #69 8/18/2010

If the e-mail is real your provider will have your name on it in the message spelled correctly (not dwight-watt(sic) for instance) and the address will all show from your provider. However in the case of most of the email systems, they now have tons of space. If you are using the email from your ISP or related to your place of work you may be limited.

I got several messages in last week saying “General Email Maintainance” (sic) in the subject line and showed from webmail.com. The message said I had exceeded my quota and needed to click on the link. Looking at the address further showed it was in Japan.

These were phishing emails. They want me to go to the link, give my email address and password and possibly more information and they can then control my email and try to grab sensitive information.

Do not answer these emails, do not go to the link in them (if you hover on the link you may see goes to an unusual location) or the link in the email address is somewhere you never heard of (mine went to a site that was 9hz.com which is a forwarding service so we really do not know where the link in my email was pointing to. I do not know anything about the 9hz domain so I would suggest not using).

If you do respond to one and give out any information immediately contact law enforcement, your banks and credit cards to stop them.

These messages are just the latest tricks that people are using to try to get people to give them information to steal from them. This is not something that is just with the Internet. Before the Internet appeared people did this my mail and phone and both those approaches are still used so do not give out credit card numbers, social security numbers, passwords, etc to people calling, writing or emailing you and only to places you know you have contacted and are safe.

Be safe and have fun on the Internet and let it be a useful tool for you.