Having retired there is probably not going to be any urgent emails to deal with so the setting can be changed to Manual – ideally there would be a Once A Day or even an Every Other Day option.
Tax Refund Scam eMail
Splendid! A £1,400.00 tax refund. But wait a minute…
“Dear Customer”? Since when have I been a customer of HMRC?
“How to return itself have not changed, only the format of what you claim and how you get paid back from HMRC has changed digitally.” At least they have cleared that up.
It is the cheery “Best Regards,” that is the clincher.
Apple Downloads Adobe bargains email scam
Interesting email from Apple offering huge discounts on Adobe software…
..but wait. That is not my usual email address. The web site looks like an Apple site apart from the poor [wikipop]typeface[/wikipop] choice.
The About Us page masterfully utilises the English language to convince anyone that might be thinking that this was not a real Apple page.
Splendid. Next.
Bing bong
A humorous (in a tedious seen it all before kind of way) email from my daughter concluded (it was her HotMail account) with the message:
Surfing the web just got more rewarding. Download the New Internet Explorer 8
…which was the funniest part of the email. A good laugh is what one would normally expect from Microsoft but…. their new Bing search engine looks like it could be worth taking seriously.
The Amazing Bouncing Spam
At 6:30 on Thursday (17/04/08) evening about 10 bounced spam emails arrived – someone having used my domain to send their spam. I had had a flurry of similar activity last year but that soon dried up. Over the next couple of days the number would edge towards 4500. On Friday 200 an hour were arriving.
Alarmingly some were “Out Of Office” auto-responses. I assume if anyone actually replied to the thing it would come back to me but replying to spam is never a good idea.
Several used some form of filtering service like Sendo or MailMarshal.
Most had the body of the message removed but from the few that had it intact it was apparently a link to bonmerfiket.net or Legal RX Medications as they like to be known. They have a splendid Anti Spam policy but you would not want to type your details into their form nor enter any financial details into their online order form – even though they claim years of experience, which is really impressive, but probably not too many customers in their early days.
Samuel Stimms seems to be somewhat elusive but if he actually existed he is probably related to Alex Polyakov who is usually high on the Spamhaus most wanted list.
If only everybody used a Mac we could be spared such things 