Posted on 06/01/2006 12:20:31 PM PDT by nickcarraway
ping
what?? Lets ditch the post office instead
so, we're waiting for the suggestion we were sure you were going to make....
Settle down.
The reason that email scams work is that people fall for them... there is no way for them to be dangerous on their own.
educate yourself, be aware, and don't do idiotic things like give your banking info to someone who claims to want to give you 2% of a hundred million dollars! If you don't know that certain emails (or the web links contained in them) are scams, you probably shouldn't be on the internet at all.
Yeah, and as soon as you make something idiot proof, sure enough, someone will invent a better idiot.
There's a neat little invention by Alexander Graham Bell that looks promising.
I came this (fingers about 1/16" apart) close to falling for a really, really good one about a month ago. PayPal phishing scam said someone had bought and paid for something (multi hundred dollar item) on my account and fraud was suspected, click here to acknowledge...
I use Opera and hover over any link in these kind of emails, so I can see the true address in the status bar, and he actually had a pretty believable URL, so between that and being livid about someone supposedly ripping me off, I almost went for it.
priceless.
tacked it on the fridge.
The model would have to be something web-based, like Yahoo! Mail with superior spam filtering and accessible by devices that can't normally browse web pages.
Which one is Gore?
The company I work for maintains it's own email servers, and I rarely need to go out side the system. Only a few times per month. In the last three years I only receiveed two juck e-mails.
My account at home only accepts know senders.
You can avoid unwanted e-mails.
Huh? I use them every danged day.
Huh? I use them every danged day.
FTP, yeah, but even then, only anonymous ftp is worthwhile. I don't use telnet for anything anymore, when ssh/scp/sftp is soooooo much better. I take that back. I do use telnet for one thing... "telnet www.blah.com 80" is useful for diagnosing website issues. Even that one useful thing is pretty much supplanted by the firefox 'livehttpheaders' plugin though.
Yup. Good spam filters are a must though unless you change email addresses often. I have had the same email address for more than ten years now. Not only that, but my primary is just my initials, so I get hit with every automatic address generating spambot on the planet. Prior to moving to some extremely powerful filters at my email provider, I was getting 200 or so spam a day, and had created filters that were basically whitelists. If you weren't on the list, you got dumped to trash.
I support the author's idea of requiring computation be a part of generating the email, but see issues with this when it is applied to some of the mailing lists I'm on that have been ongoing concerns for years. I also don't much care for a system that will do away with anonymous email, as there is a place for even such things.
I've tried to encourage folks to use encryption for years, but have pretty much given up that battle, because people just don't care, even when they should.
"ftp and the beloved Usenet nntp were "abandoned" years ago"
holy crap, why didn't any of you here tell me!
i'm such a loser.
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