Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

I get a good amount of spam. You probably do, too. UGHHH! I hate it. I HATE the stuff and I HATE hashing through it. It’s also not safe to open it unless you know exactly who has sent it. But sometimes it’s really hard to tell. How do I know for sure that the email labeled “Your Order Has Been Shipped” is the real discount furniture I ordered, or is it a scam? And is that “PayPal Receipt” is really from PayPal and not a phisher?? Well, here’s a little tip for you:

Right click on the suspicious email and choose “Properties.” A new window will pop up. You can see the sender’s email here. Now see that tab that says “Details”? Click it and you will see all the techincal information about the sender, his IP, his email, your email, and other tidbits of information. Look for the “Received from” and you can see the sender’s email source and his IP. If you take that IP and search for it using Whois or a tracing site, it will give you a general idea of where the email is coming from. So that email may LOOK like it’s from Uncle Bob in Kansas, but the IP is showing an address in Russia. Hm.

Now this is not 100% fail-proof. Emails go ’round and ’round various servers. And if Uncle Bob uses Hotmail or Gmail, hgis location is going to show the location of the Hotmail or Gmail server. So sometimes knowing the IP address is unhelpful. You can view the message without opening the email. In the Properties window, where you clicked the Details tab, you can see a button that says “Message Source.” If you click that, a new window will appear, with the message content in text form. All html source coding (and any pixel spies and also all images) will not show. You can scan the message. You’ll also see alot of html code in there for images or special font characters.

The “Properties” element in menus is one of my favorite features. I use it all the time to see what’s underlying!