Links in e-mails
 

This morning I learned something that I did not know. If you open an e-mail, and there is a link in there that you are not sure about, this is what you can do. Move your cursor over the link, DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK, but, look at the bottom of your screen, it will show where that link will take you to. I tried this with a few e-mails and it worked for me. One of the e-mails looked official, but when I hovered over the link, it would take me to a jewelry site, not even close to what it was supposed to be. Needless to say, I did not click on that link. Just thought that I would give you a heads up.

Thank you so much for that. Wish I had seen it 30 minutes ago! This is something we all need to know - and remember!

I never open one that I do not know who sent it, heard to many bad story's about that.

thanks for that safety reminder!

Don't even touch those links! They are trojans.... have very NASTY viruses imbedded in them which will spam your entire contact list.....Ask me how I know!

I've had a couple of friends send out emails without subject lines that have nothing but these links inside of them. They went to open the link since the email was from their friends and were then directed to fictitious websites. In the meantime, their entire mailboxes were copied and sent out spam with these links imbedded with their email addresses.

It took FOREVER for them to get an antivirus software to get the viruses debugged. One friend took over 3 months of repeat problems before it finally was resolved. This was IN SPITE OF THE FACT that all of them had active antivirus software running at the time the emails came in.

Bottom line - when in doubt, DON'T touch it.

Good luck getting your email cleaned out!

If someone gets your contacts do you need to get a new e-mail addy?

No, you don't have to, since this is a response driven virus, not something that is being actively tracked. If it was a virus being actively tracked, you would see a spike in various spam emails.

In my experience, once you clean it up, you don't have future problems unless you open something from a friend again with the type of stuff like I described above who reinfects your machine. When that happens, you just have to go through the cleanup process again. This is what happened to my friend that took 3 months to clean up.

We all now know what to look for so we just trash them when they come in and immediately email the friend back to let them know they have had their email spammed so they can debug their machine and not spread the problem further.

Hope this helps! My family has been in IT for most of our lives and this is a relatively minor problem, mostly just a nuisance.

I have been doing this for years, especially with phishing emails. You don't need to click on the link, just hover over it and look at the bottom of the page.

I hope this helps more people to avoid email scams and phishing.

And of course, remember -- the IRS does NOT have your email address and is not sending you an important email.

-- Any email from UPS or USPS that has an attachment should be deleted without opening.

Also watch for emails that may look ok at first glance but on closer viewing are bad. I recently got an email that appeared to be from AARP. For some reason I looked closer at the email address(in parenthesis after "AARP") and it just didn't look anything aarp would be using. I deleted it.

I don't open any emails I don't know who sent it. Had a bad virus attach a few years ago because of opening an unknown email. It was $$$ to say the least to get the computer washed out. If a friend sends a link they explain what it deals with and I do the same for them.