Is this a spammer, scammer, or worse?

[Texas Star]

I have both G-mail and another e-mail service. On the other, I got a couple of e-mails supposedly from G-mail, with sophisticated women's names on them as the actual sender, presumably with G-mail.


I didn't open them as I was suspicious and nothing was showing up on the G-mail account.


Now, they're gone (I didn't delete) and I have another, labled as being from GMailTeam. When I hover the cursor over the GMail team, it shows an address of [email protected]


Does this mean that fabiola (whoever that is) is posing as GMail?


What do you more knowledgeable computer men make of this? Should I open or delete the e-mail?


Seems odd that G-Mail wouldn't contact me on their board and that this showed up on the other service.


BTW, the other e-mail service classified all three messages as Junk.


Ideas? Anyone else here getting that sort of e-mail?

[moralem]

Delete, don't open they are all scams or advertising or even worse.

[ditrina]

TS...

Just delete and go about your business, don't give it a second thought.

[bigwheelzip]

Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. Because the core email protocols do not have any mechanism for authentication, it is common for spam and phishing emails to use such spoofing to mislead the recipient about the origin of the message.

[Bozz10mm]

Yep. Scams, spams, and phishing schemes. Don't open them. Anytime you hover the cursor over the sender and it shows something different...well, they are hiding something.

[amazingflapjack]

If I don't know the sender-it is deleted. I opened one that was an alert from UPS or some delivery service saying they had trouble making a delivery. I opened it, and was hit with that threatening scam where you have to pay these sorry individuals not to take your saved items-in my case, my photos. I was able to run my security system and "quarantine" the thing. It occurred to me later that UPS didn't have my email address, so I should have stopped and thought about it before opening the email. That's the world we live in now. My IT guy says they hit some hospital for mega bucks not to take their records. This is Sociopath 101 guys.

[Texas Star]

A few years ago, I opened e-mails from people whom I knew on other message boards, none gun-related. They turned out to be ads for electronic items. Could have been worse. Of course, the e-mails were from someone who'd broken into their accounts and stolen their lists of correspondents.


Got one message from a woman who claimed to be stranded and in need of money. But she wrote in French. Caty IS French, although she marrried English. But she knew that I don't speak French, so we always used English. She's bi-lingual.


A few days later, the real Caty sent out a mass mailing to warn that her account at Facebook had been hacked and her addresses stolen. Where the thugs went wrong is that they contacted her friends without checking to see who she wrote to in French and who in English. This alerted me and, probably others, that the e-mail wasn't genuine.


How can I tell if G-Mail or some other entity really is trying to contact me?

[TX-Dennis]

I've even gotten spam email from myself a few times.

Delete.

Done.

[vytoland]

if it smells like fish...............

YouTube

[LouisianaJoe]

I am a semi-retired software developer. I will try to explain some of this. When email is sent by a program, it can specify the sender and the receiver. I wrote a program for an appellate court that will send email from the court's email address to attorney's email addresses involved in a case when someone working for the court records a motion in a case.

Spammers use this technique to send bogus emails from anyone to anyone. They use emails that they harvest using different methods. You may forward emails containing spam to your friends without knowing that it is spam.

If you do forward an email, delete all email addresses from the email that you received. Also use BCC(blind carbon copy) to specify the emails that you want to send to. This will make receivers emails invisible to everyone. To do this most email clients allow you to use BCC in place of TO.

If you see an email address from the sender that you do not recognize, assume that it is bad. If you receive an email from someone that you know to an address that you have not used to send an email to, assume that it is bad. If the sending email address has a domain name that is not from this country(Example **** is from Russia) assume that it is bad. When in doubt, assume that it is bad.

[ChattanoogaPhil]

Originally Posted by Texas Star

I have both G-mail and another e-mail service. On the other, I got a couple of e-mails supposedly from G-mail, with sophisticated women's names on them as the actual sender, presumably with G-mail.

Secret admirer?

Probably hot babe... don't let her get away!

[Arik]

I just delete and don't think twice about it. Even if it's one of those emails from a friend stand in another country. There is no way in today's day and age that a stranded friend managed to get word to me through email but couldn't find a phone. And if it's an emergency email is probably the worst way to go about reaching someone considering the fact that sometimes email to spam and sometimes I don't check them for a week.

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

[model3sw]

WHEN IN DOUBT .... DELETE WITHOUT OPENING. HOWEVER, if you opened it, you may want to run a full virus scan. Also, a great free program, I find better than Malware bytes, is SPYBOT, and it is free. It is so good, I've used it for the past 10 years. They only ask for a donation which I gladly send. BUY a GOOD Virus / Internet protection program.

In the past 2 months I have received dozens of spam mails, the most recent slew are UPS or FedEX spoof mails that look good but ask you to download and / or open the attempted delivery document. DON'T DO IT ! I fell for that one just once about 5 years ago. Before I realized that FedEx did not have THAT email address (I am a FedEx shipper) it was too late. I tried for 2 days to clean the hard drive. When it all failed (even removing the hard drive and scanning it from another computer on a external drive connection) it was no better. I had to wipe the drive and start all over again.

Most of these are malware, spy ware and tracking devices. Most of them try to make you believe they are legit but are not.

Last week, 3 that were supposed to be from PayPal but were not.

I advise EVERYONE to get a private email address. At GoDaddy.com you can buy any (cheapest) domain name of your liking. You get a free 3 page web presence (not quite a website but sort of) ... AND .... you get 1 FREE Email address you create. Any first name followed by the @ being the domain you just purchased. e.g. [email protected] (net, us or any one of 100s of extensions)

Once you have THAT private emial address, as you get spam you can search who really came from and block the entire domain. On a PRIVATE email server (such as godaddy) it is a SECURE server. It has an option that you can look up the TRUE sender, not just the bogus or disguised sender that the face of the email shows. You can then elect to BLOCK the SENDER or BLOCK the entire domain it came from.
You can also set it to do an AUTO-PURGE on entire domains . e.g. spam mail from a domain in China or France, etc.

After you set the BLOCK or AUTO-PURGE on these domains that churn spam you don't see them any more. I'll admit it can get quite exhaustive setting blocks and purges for all these bogus mails for me because it is Corporate.

Anyone concerned about security should have a PRIVATE email account of their own.

You can still get in trouble if you open a bogus email or attachiment. The biggest problem being when someone you know has their email account hacked. The hacker steals all the legitmate email addresses to use as SENDER (naturally it is not from that sender but disguised as such).

[Tom S.]

How's this for low life's? About a week after my wife passed away, I started getting email from dating services.

[GaryS]

One of the best techniques I've found for finding scam emails is setting my email client to text only, no HTML. If I get an email that is in HTML and it's legit, I change the view option just long enough to read the email. Then, it's back to text only.