Laurel L. Russwurm's ^ blog

Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit

I just got a new kind of SCAM:

The title of this micro-blog-post was the subject line of the email.  The scammer is pretending to be my email administrator!.  NOT!

Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit which is 20GB as set by your administrator, You are currently running on 20.9GB.  You may not be able to send or receive new mail until you re-validate your mailbox. To re-validate your mailbox please click the link below:
[LINK EXPUNGED - it was BOGUS)
Thanks
System Administrator

Because I know my email administrator personally I knew right away that this was false. 

Even so, NEVER click on a link in an email you aren't sure of.  Because most of us have learned not to open suspect email attachments, now the scammers are trying to get us to click on links taking us to who knows where for what nefarious purpose.  I'll pass, thanks.

Even though most email programs give you the ability to use words to describe your link, it is a better practice to have the link show  up as the URL when you're sending your own email.  That way the people you are sending email too know where the link will take them, and will know right away if they don't end up in the right place.

Email from people you know can be suspect.  Scammers can "spoof" an email address.  I know that one of my earlier email addresses is being spoofed because I get bounced spam that I certainly never sent.   

Worse is when your email box is hacked. 

I am currently out of touch with one of my cousins because I've received email supposedly from her but which actually originated in China.  (It pays to hang out with nerds and geeks.)

I suspect that is what they are trying to do in this particular case.  If you "revalidate" and give them your email password, or if they can guess your password, that's giving them the keys to your emailbox.  Once they can get in they have access to all the email addresses, and can send out spam in your name.

My rule of thumb is, when I want to buy something or donate to something, I will find them.  At our house we NEVER buy anything from telephone solicitors, or answer spam.

sharing a book can be a struggle

I've been critically re-reading some of my favorite genre authors to try and keep my head in the right place for writing my own novel.  So I was only part way through my re-read of Frances Fyfield's "Undercurrents" when I picked up Cory Doctorow's new novel Makers from Wordsworth Books.

Since I was otherwise occupied (living in the boonies, one must grab the books one wants when the opportunity arises, particularly since I would much rather patronize an excellent book shop than, say, Amazon. Don't get me wrong,  Amazon does a lot right... it is great to get for getting hold of obscure books you can't find anywhere else,  or filling those longstanding gaps in your library.  And I certainly don't want to get mixed up with a Kindle even if they are finally available in Canada. 

Still, I think it is important to buy local first.  I was sad when the neighboring specialty book shop went under.  If you're a book lover, there is nothing better than shopping for books live and in person.  Also, as a consumer I've learned that retail centralization is not done for my benefit. 

So even though I wasn't ready to crack it, I wanted to buy it because I was in the neighborhood.  (Actually I was in the neighborhood to meet some other NaNoWriMo writers who, like me, are still working on finishing our novels. Jessica has been organizing Non-Nano write-ins, and it was being held a couple of doors down from Wordsworth.)\.

So I asked my husband to nip over to Wordsworth to grab me a copy.  And he did, along with the book the kid had requested and a science tome for himself.  But of course once he had "Makers" in his hot little hands, that was the one he started reading.  Foolish me.  He took custody of it.

Now that I'm ready to read it myself, he of course isn't finished. 

Worse, he's been tucking it away -- out of sight -- so it's a question of my first having to find it if I want to read it.

Of course I'm a faster reader... probably because he's always reading 12 things... like that science tome, and his latest Uncle Johns' Bathroom Reader which is his annual Christmas gift from my sister, and of course it doesn't get to stay in the bathroom until after he's sucked out all the great trivia,  Analog, and always several "improving" books that always seem to be a difficult read.

Naturally the first thing I did was to loose his page.  (He was using the dust jacket flap as a bookmark.) Not on purpose, accidentally. 

Really.