The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
A security researcher has discovered a massive leak of email addresses – in fact more than *800 million* email addresses. The massive exposure is due to lax security at an email address verification service called Verifications.io. Never used Verifications.io? It doesn’t matter, the odds are very good that your email address is in there.
Every webmail service out there, be it Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or other, encourages you to upload or merge your contacts with their system. And most Mac and PC email programs automatically cross-reference an incoming email sender with their entry in your contacts. The result is often that their contact profile picture, and ‘friendly’ name, is displayed as the sender of that email in your inbox.
If you use Aweber, you probably received a notice from them today (December 28, 2018) saying that they were turning off confirmed opt-in (also known as double opt-in) – but only for certain integrations with certain 3rd parties.
If you are anything like me, you quickly got tired of having to delete the “On such-and-such a date, so-and-so wrote:” attribution quote line every ..single ..time ..you replied to an email in Mac’s native mail program, Mail.app. Oddly, given how friendly the Mac generally is, there is no way to alter, customize, edit, or remove that infernal line through preferences. Or, really, through any other obvious way. Here’s how to change it. Here is how to fix it for all versions, including the change for 10.8 Mountain Lion!
If you use Verizon for your email, receiving email at or sending it from a verizon.net email address, have we got some news for you: Verizon is retiring their email service. This means you have two options: switching to a new system entirely and losing your @verizon.net email address, or switching to AOL (where you will still be able to send/receive using your Verizon email address).
We love reporting spammers. It’s such a satisfying feeing to report a spamer, especially when you get a response back saying that the spammer has been nuked. But many people don’t know how to report spam email. So we thought that we would share the love with you, and tell you how to report a spammer.
Have you ever tried to report spam, or report a spammer, only to be asked to copy and paste and send them your full email headers? Have you experienced frustration trying to figure out what it is that you are supposed to send, and where to find that email header? Well, the Internet Patrol to the rescue! Here is a simple, plain English, straight-forward tutorial to find your email headers, for nearly any email program!
We recently ran into the following situation: a sales person was helping a customer order something online. The sales person was filling out the online information, and when it got to “Email address”, instead of asking the customer for their email address, they put “na@gmail.com”, ‘na’ for ‘not applicable’ or ‘not available’. This is a very bad idea.
The State Bar of California has issued an alert warning of a fraudulent complaint email being sent in their name. In an emailed statement this morning (June 8, 2016), the California State Bar said that it had received numerous inquiries about the email that supposedly had come from them, going out to members of the California bar.
Back in 2014 Facebook announced that it was discontinuing the Facebook email service (where people could email you at your_username@facebook.com). That’s because it wasn’t very popular. But just in case you were one of the handful of people who used your @facebook.com email address, they kept a forwarding service on so that your Facebook email address would still forward to your address of record at Facebook. However, now Facebook has finally completely shut down the email service, including email forwarding.
For more than four years we have been telling you that law enforcement can get to any electronic communications you have stored for more than 180 days in the cloud (and that ‘cloud’ is just a fancy word for “somebody else’s computer”). This is because the Electronics Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) only requires a subpoena in order for a governmental agency to get at those communications records that you have stored on that third-party server – they do not need a warrant.
If you have started seeing a little red padlock in your Gmail email, don’t freak out, even if the red padlock is open. All that it means is that the sender didn’t use transport layer security (TLS) when sending it – in other words, it simply means that the email was not encrypted when it was sent.
Few people aren’t aware of at least one of the Hillary Clinton, Sony Pictures, or American Egg Board email scandals. But what should we learn from them, and has anybody actually learned from them?