FROM A EMAIL EXCHANGE
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>I have had it with Recieving Phising Emails
>Posted by: “Cy Witherspoon”
>Mon Dec 3, 2007 12:13 pm (PST)
>Have you ever received emails from some relative that you don’t know in
>Nigeria, UK, or some other far land? Explaining that you won/
>inherited some large sum of money?
Dear dotcomeraden! Cy:
I share your frustration. But it IS always NICE to hear from long lost relatives in Area Code 419!
I reformulated some of my form letters that I use (i.e., “Job hunting help”, “why would you want to network with me”, “why would I want to network with you”, and my personal favorite “I’m dropping you from my network, you ass”) to incorporate some of the principles in many of the Nigerian spam letters. Some do a very good job of communicating their feigned concern for the reader’s benefit. Better than my honest concern for the unfortunate job seeker suddenly out of work, or the lost soul who thinks I’m a good networking contact in the “left handed paperhanging field as a right handed paper hanger”. If these folks are successful with these lame excuses for an email, then I want to learn to make my real ones better.
But what really prompted me to write this email is the following comment:
>I am not sure of the legal ramifications, but I am all for some type of
>legislation to ban these types of fraudulent emails.
Oh, please NO! Don’t ask the politicians, who think the inept is a bunch of pipes like plumbing, to “help” us. We’ll be filling out forms for each email , paying more taxes, and be forced to use only approved email vendors. And, who knows what else they will think of?
Remember politicians’ only motive is to be reelected, from whence they can (in priority order): (1) feather their own nest; (2) reward their friends; and (3) punish their enemies. Remember you ask for their help and they see a job for their brother-in-law.
We don’t need legislation. We NEED ivy, public key encryption, and some self-defense.
IVY will give us a fully authentic network; No more forging IP addresses. Public key encryption ensures authenticity of who’s on the other end of the email. And, some self-defense.
I can give you a strategy that have virtually rendered me immune — create dedicated emails. You can use GMAIL’s plus feature. Or just lots of GMAIL ids for dedicated email addresses. Or Yahoo has spamguard. Or, if you have your own domain, then you can spawn all the addresses you need.
So here’s how I have it working, when I sign up for CITIBANK, I give them a unique email address. (It might be MYID+123456 @ gmail.com, FOOTLOOSE-CITI @ yahoo.com, or CITI-123456 @ reinke.cc. It really doesn’t matter.) Any communication coming in purporting to be from CITIBANK, that doesn’t come in on the “correct” email address, is prima facie spam and I delete immediately. One email per sensitive use, and you don’t have to pay any attention to your “relatives” in 419 land.
But, please don’t ask the gooferment to help. The “cure” will be worse that then “disease”.
>dotcomeraden!
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Readers here have seen my use of dotcomeraden. So no need to repeat.
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