[Pythonmac-SIG] donation

has hengist.podd at virgin.net
Wed May 25 15:07:24 CEST 2005


Lee Cullens wrote:

>All well and good Robert (and no disrespect intended) - but to me  they seem to be more interested in sending spam than alerting those  that do business with them.

I've had a PayPal account since last year and have never received unsolicited mail from them. If you really are getting unwanted mails from PayPal (as opposed to scam mails that only pretend to be), check the Profile > Notifications settings for your PayPal account.

As for catching the phishing spam, they're dead easy to spot once you know what they are: like Nigerian 409s, they tend to follow pretty predictable patterns. Any mail with a subject line like "Paypal Team identified some unusual activity in your account" is already more or less a dead cert. The "Dear Anonymous Customer" introduction is another giveaway (real PayPal emails always address you by your real name), as is the "click this link to login" bit (something you should NEVER do, as PayPal themselves will tell you). Just forward with full headers to spoof at paypal.com if you're feeling civic minded, and delete.

An additional trick might be to set up a separate 'private' email address solely for use with your PayPal account, and put a filter on your inbox that automatically marks as spam any message claiming to be from PayPal that arrives at any other address.

HTH

has
-- 
http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/


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