In the olden days I was an IT manager, and had significant hands-on responsibilities with corporate computer users as well as e-mail stuff (once we brought the e-mail server in-house).
I hated spam, but knew that it was a battle that we would never win. Anti-spam technology wouldn’t win out against spammers who have tons of time and talent on their hands, and lots of patience. And, as long as there are people who continue to click on it (and it happened all the time, from the n00bie to the CEO, from the non-techie to my tech team, everyone clicked on stupid stuff (except me, of course)).
Anyway, check out this image, and the descriptions below for each point I bring out:
- This looks pretty legit… based on this subject line, I thought it was real.
- This is the first red flag - look in the brackets. Why is the UPS coming from an @bowenrealestate.com address???
- This slipped past me the first few times I looked, but guess what - I don’t use this e-mail address! They scraped it from the web somewhere.
- This is one of the biggest red flags - a zip attachment. No legit company should send you a zip file from out of the blue. If you get a zip file from anyone you don’t know, delete the entire e-mail. Harsh, perhaps, but it beats spending days messing around trying to fix a virus.
- “July the 1st?” Who would write that?? Also, an e-mail from UPS would have proper formatting, which means a space between the two paragraphs.
- This was kind of subtle also, except I’m a nut for the period… which you’ll notice is missing. Doh!
- This is not an e-mail signature I’d expect to see from a legit company. If nothing else, I’d think they would put in a gray-font disclosure statement… this looks too bare. Not to mention, “Your UPS” is not the way they would refer to themselves… perhaps Your UPS Team, or something like that. Oh yeah, forgot the “sincerely,” did ya?
I think this post will help those offshore spammers more than the poor, unsuspecting recipient. Nothing helps the poor, unsuspecting recipient, and they keep the anti-spam vendors in business as much as the spammers themselves!