The Lemon Fool

I've just received the following email

'YOU HAVE JUST BEEN HACKED.

Divulging SOS

Greeting! Ihavetosharebadnews.....'

That's all I can see without opening the email. The address after hovering over it is nothing special.

I'm sure its crap.

I've reported it as phishing and it's in my deleted hotmail folder.

Should I open it (I'm curious) or should I just deleted it and move on. FWIW I dont appear to have been hacked.

Thanks.

Hmmm....

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/out ... fb9739697a

Tedx wrote:I've just received the following email

'YOU HAVE JUST BEEN HACKED.

Divulging SOS

Greeting! Ihavetosharebadnews.....'

That's all I can see without opening the email. The address after hovering over it is nothing special.

I'm sure its crap.

I've reported it as phishing and it's in my deleted hotmail folder.

Should I open it (I'm curious) or should I just deleted it and move on. FWIW I dont appear to have been hacked.

Thanks.

Option 1

Open it ...

Option 2

Open it ...

Option 3

Open it ...

Option 4

Open it ...

Option 5

Open it ...

Signed ... The Bot

AiY(D)
This poor joke will self destruct if you open your phishing email.

For those of you watching in black and white

Don't open it

My mum gets spammed a lot on email because she doesn't have the housing keeping knowledge to protect herself from it.
She sometimes opens an email and then worries when it's something demanding money or action for this or that reason. Somebody with greater it knowledge than me will confirm or otherwise but I have always told that there is no danger to her in opening and viewing an email but she must never click on a link within an email.

Unfortunately she also receives similar scam telephone calls and scam texts occasionally. I remind her frequently that due to the world we live in today she must treat everything she is unsure of as a scam and any legitimate organization will send her a letter if it's an important matter.

Dicky99 wrote:I have always told that there is no danger to her in opening and viewing an email but she must never click on a link within an email.

Simply opening an email is unlikely to do any direct damage. But the fact it has been opened can be tracked. And thus the sender knows your email is valid, and you’re the sort of person who reads them. Hence they are much more likely to target further spam at that address. May well be why she receives so much

Gryff

gryffron wrote:

Dicky99 wrote:I have always told that there is no danger to her in opening and viewing an email but she must never click on a link within an email.

Simply opening an email is unlikely to do any direct damage. But the fact it has been opened can be tracked. And thus the sender knows your email is valid, and you’re the sort of person who reads them. Hence they are much more likely to target further spam at that address. May well be why she receives so much

Gryff

That depends on the settings in your email client or you opening images and accepting the warnings that you might be tracked. The default in most (all?) clients is to not automatically open images, which is how the tracking happens.

Perhaps it's a benefit of using Gmail, I never see stuff like that. If I did, I'd just delete it and forget about it.

There once was a time when opening an email in outlook could cause outlook to run an embedded script. That was some time ago, and limited to the microsoft email client. Using a different email client avoided the issue.

I believe that microsoft fixed this (deliberate) flaw quite a while ago.

However the advice remains.

Clicking on a link still causes attached documents to open or files to run. Word or excel documents can contain macros that are really bits of code. This is actually why opening emails use to be dangerous. Microsoft used the same functions as Word to display emails, hence the same risks.

I use Gmail and have to open emails before I can see the delete icon. Is there a way to delete an email I don't want to open because I think it may be spam? I swipe left to delete unwanted emails on my yahoo account but on Gmail doing so only archives them.

TIA

Tricia

6Tricia wrote:I use Gmail and have to open emails before I can see the delete icon. Is there a way to delete an email I don't want to open because I think it may be spam? I swipe left to delete unwanted emails on my yahoo account but on Gmail doing so only archives them.

I assume you're using Gmail on a phone or tablet? If so, you have 2 ways of doing this.

1. In Settings you can configure Swipe Actions, to delete the email if you either swipe right or left.

2. In the message list, a long press on a message will give you the option to delete it without opening it.

Although as has been pointed out, the default action is usually to not follow external links automatically, so simply opening an email wouldn't be harmful.

Scott.

6Tricia wrote:I use Gmail and have to open emails before I can see the delete icon. Is there a way to delete an email I don't want to open because I think it may be spam? I swipe left to delete unwanted emails on my yahoo account but on Gmail doing so only archives them.

TIA

Tricia

In the browser webmail client if you hover the mouse pointer over the message in the inbox it should throw up a bin icon to the right, no need to click on the message.

Infrasonic wrote:

6Tricia wrote:I use Gmail and have to open emails before I can see the delete icon. Is there a way to delete an email I don't want to open because I think it may be spam? I swipe left to delete unwanted emails on my yahoo account but on Gmail doing so only archives them.

TIA

Tricia

In the browser webmail client if you hover the mouse pointer over the message in the inbox it should throw up a bin icon to the right, no need to click on the message.

Or in the browser client I use (there might be a couple of style choices now I think of it) there's a check box to the left
- select and hit delete (or the bin icon)

servodude wrote:

Infrasonic wrote:
In the browser webmail client if you hover the mouse pointer over the message in the inbox it should throw up a bin icon to the right, no need to click on the message.

Or in the browser client I use (there might be a couple of style choices now I think of it) there's a check box to the left
- select and hit delete (or the bin icon)

And if you use the ctrl key (might be a different key on other OS platforms) with the tick box selection you can delete multiple emails in one go in the webmail option - long press on multiple emails in the Android phone client to do the same.

swill453 wrote:...
Although as has been pointed out, the default action is usually to not follow external links automatically, so simply opening an email wouldn't be harmful.

Scott.

Unless there is a zero click exploit, in which case you don't even need to click on a message to get a possible infection with malware/spyware.

There's been some more recent analysis of the NSO Pegasus iOS/Android exploit and it's even more sophisticated than they first thought - references to the coders being genius level (which is more than a bit worrying...). The iOS breach got studied more as one of the security firms managed to catch a live infection, look at the logs and reverse engineer it.

Those were state level targeted attacks on individuals but the exploit methodologies have a habit of leaking down to the lower tiers, so you never know when it will become more mainstream and end up being used by the financial gain scammer market.

Thank you all for your help. So easy when you know how . On my Android Galaxy tablet a long press on the message does, indeed, bring up the delete bin on the right!

Tricia