After my embarrassing approval of spam last week, I received enough
"embarrassing moments in e-mail" replies to fill several
newsletters. While I won't bore you with the details, I'll share
some of the lessons learned and maybe it'll prevent you from making
the same mistake.
We've all heard embarrassing stories about sending personal e-mail
to huge internal distribution lists. Some of our readers were on the
DLs, a few were the ones sending it. Some blamed Outlook 2002/2003's
autocomplete feature. Autocomplete makes it easy to send messages to
frequent contacts, but if you aren't paying attention when you
select the address you can easily choose the wrong David or Jill.
Others said they typed names in the To field and had autoresolution
disabled, so the names didn't resolve immediately. When they hit
Send, Outlook picked what it thought was the correct address.
Unfortunately Outlook was wrong.
Other readers reported they copied text from another message or
document, with the intention of updating it before sending. Some
people reported working with templates containing fields they needed
to complete, marked with "[enter recipients name here]" and sending
it without completing the fields. Others started to update a
message, but forget to change the subject line or other details. .
During the Office 2003 beta test, one beta tester requested a dialog
be added to Outlook that asked "Are you sure you want to send this
message to <e-mail address>?" after he mistakenly sent a message to
the wrong person. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be much help as most
people would disable the dialog after the first "Are you sure?". SSW's LookOut! For Outlook:
http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/lookOut/
Bob writes "I wrote a reply to a co-worker in anger and left it open
on my desktop. Later I accidentally sent it. Thankfully, this is one
time Message Recall worked. Moral of my story? I learned to close
messages and save them to Drafts instead of leaving them open on the
Task bar."
Read complete article...
Many embarrassing moments are the result of lack of knowledge of
netiquette and "newbie mistakes". Few users need trained on how to
open an e-mail client, type a message and send it, but if no one
takes the time to teach users the finer points of using e-mail, how
will they know that typing in all caps (because it's easier for the
sender to read on the screen) means you are screaming at the
recipient? Other common mistakes, like forwarding every hoax or
virus alert to everyone in the address book, are easily avoided with
proper training.
If your company doesn't have e-mail training and usage guidelines in
place, or even if they do, download the "Commander's Guide to
Managing E-mail". Not only does it include many useful do's and
don'ts, it also has some great tips for managing your e-mail and
avoiding information overload. It's full of ideas for any company
writing their own guidelines and recommended reading for individual
users.
"Commander's Guide to Managing E-mail"
Help Users Take Command of E-mail, by Sue Mosher
My accident was more embarrassing to me because I spent most of the
previous evening fighting a losing battle against a trojan army of
computers controlled by spammers who are using my cdolive domain
name in their spam. I was reviewing NDRs for messages sent by
zombies and reporting the infected computers to the owner's ISP,
often cable and DSL providers. I know it won't make a dent in the
sea of spam, but if the owners are notified, it's a valuable lesson,
one I hope they learn from.
As a result of various policies in place to prevent spamming or make
it more costly, spammers began installing trojans on other people's
computers and using them to send the spam. To help escape detection,
they use false From addresses, spoofing the address in one of
several formats from random letters to names appended with letters:
vfcdregt@cdolive.com or mary.whitevb@cdolive.com. They often also
use the domain name in the header and a quick glance at the header
makes it appears the domain is the true sender: "cdolive.com
(pcp01337659pcs.kensgt01.pa.comcast.net [68.81.122.253])".
The zombies are distributed using the same techniques used for
viruses, usually via e-mail, but chats and websites are also used.
Once installed, the spammers have control of the infected computer
and personal and financial data is at risk.
By limiting the number of messages they send from each computer, the
spammers can avoid detection, and because they have hundreds or
thousands of infected computers to work with, they can easily send
100,000 messages within minutes without causing an unusual spike in
bandwidth usage. If the owner of the machine discovers they're
infected and cleans up the machine, the spammer easily replaces it
with another computer under their control. If your computer is infected, the best method of cleaning it up is
with a reformat and reinstall. It's a lot of work, but it's the only
way you can be sure the computer is clean. And finally, if your
computer is infected with a zombie, virus, or Trojan, remember to
change all of your passwords and account numbers.
Spybot Search & Destroy
How to clean up an infected computer
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