Thanks, Walle.  Good advice.  Tell us, please, what we should do if we receive an email that says something to the effect of "click here to confirm your subscription to our list."  Such a message came to me, apparently from you.  But names can get hijacked, and if I clicked on a link that I didn't know, I would be putting my computer at serious risk.  So before clicking, I came to this site to see if there was indeed some confirmation process underway, or if indeed some malevolent soul was out making mischief.  If it did come from you, perhaps it would be helpful to start a topic alerting people?

Thanks

dp4

Hey dp4,

We did send a subscription / confirmation email, but it was by accident. 

It was meant to be a test to a few email addresses – mine and ncgent's.   But the software grabbed the entire membership and sent them the confirmation.   I did not know about it for a few days until someone emailed me about it. It was from us using mailchimp.com.

Also one of the tips on the email that we sent was our notice and link
to email us if there were any questions. A number of people did.

Your bigger question is a good one and there is not one easy fix all answer to it.

When I get an email that I am unsure about that wants me to click on a link I do several things.

1. I use Free Avast – it scans any link that I try to open to makes sure the link is not trying to put something bad on my computer. If I try to access it Avast blocks the connection.

2. I make sure my status bar is on <View, Status Bar> so that when I hover my mouse over the link I can see where it really want to send me. I note the the main url and do a search in google.

for example here is one I got today for prescription drugs. (I put xttp so the link would be bad)

xttp://ula.pillsaunder73u.ru/?heepu=and8CCc55E8e1

I copied the "pillsunder732.ru" and did a search in google for it.

It came up as a really bad site. (here is the spamhaus.com report – http://www.spamhaus.org/Sbl/sbl.lasso?qu…..y=SBL98172 )

In reality, I would not even bother for a cheap drugs type of email.. but the method works for all.

In our case – if it is from someone we know just send the email to them to ask if it is legit.  I get a few every week that look strange or have a strange link and I email the sender and ask what it is.  I got a number of emails asking if our email was real. Sometimes that is the only way.

The term for faking the sender name and email address is called Phishing – Here is good test to hone you id skills.

http://www.sonicwall.com/phishing/index.html