AVR-Chat

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 09:13:24 -0500 (CDT) you wrote:

>
>Kat, I hope you don't mind my posting an off-topic e-mail, but I thought 
>someone on this group might know the answer.
>
>I seem to be on everyone's spam list and I get the usual barrage of ads 
>for drugs, loans, Nigerian scams, etc. every day.  But lately I've gotten 
>a couple new types.
>
>The e-mails are purportedly from bluemountain.com, which is an e-card 
>service with e-mail greeting cards.  It says I've received a greeting 
>card.  The first time I got one I thought it was legit and clicked on the 
>link in the e-mail.  I got a "404 Not Found" screen which was part of the 
>website I went to (a dummy screen) and something else happened between my 
>computer and the other site.  I quickly disconnected from internet and 
>examined the e-mail more closely, looking at the source code, then 
>reconneced and went to www.dnsstuff.com to look at where the e-mail had 
>actually taken me.  As I suspected, it was some place in Wall, South 
>Dakota, not Bluemountain.com.
>
>The thing is, I have no idea what the site was set up to do.  Install 
>spyware?  Harvest e-mail addresses from my computer?  Any ideas?

One function they can have is email address validation. The mail sent to you
contains a code number which is sent to the site. It is compared to their list
from the mail sent out and your email address is marked as valid and active.

If you think a mail might be legitimate then I would save it and then open it in
notepad as a text file to examine it. That won't activate the links or send them
data.

--
Ralph Hilton
http://www.ralphhilton.org
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