Tag: email

Email Verifier Website

The website at (https://emailverified.org/) is very simple and has two services:-

  1. To verify an email address
  2. To check a phone number to see if it is an automated service (known as a robocaller)

There is no explanation on the website of how these checks are made – they are assumed to be checking the entered phone number or email address against industry blacklists, but that could be wrong.

You enter an email address and get either ‘Email is Valid’ or ‘Email is Invalid’ response with no explanation.

Or you enter a phone number and either get ‘Phone number is clear’ or ‘This phone number is a robocaller’ response.

The website also doesn’t state whether it does anything with the phone numbers and email addresses entered – maybe they are added to blacklists or maybe not.

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The Dropbox Fake Message Scam

Most email services have a maximum message size you can send and sometimes limits on attached file sizes. This is generally only a problem if you’re trying to send video clips but can occur if you want to send a group of high resolution pictures for example or a series of large documents.

Yahoo and Gmail limit is 25MB per message

Outlook limit is 20 MB but Office 365 expands considerably on this.

Paid for email services and business email systems may have much higher maximum message sizes or even no limit in some cases.

  1. What to do when you want to email a very large file

Services like Dropbox have been created to solve this problem.

It is very efficient – you simply upload a file to Dropbox (or a similar service) using your free or paid for account and effectively send a link to the recipient and they can then download the file without filling up your or their email folders.

The Dropbox fake message scam depends on people being used to receiving these Dropbox messages and clicking to download the file.

Scammers upload a piece of malware disguised as an invoice or holiday template or some other document then send out Dropbox links to that document to a spam email list in hope at least some of the recipients will download and open the malware file.

If you receive a Dropbox file from someone you know and you expected the file, then fine.

If it’s from a person you know but didn’t expect a file, then contact them to see if the file is genuine.

But if it’s from someone you don’t know – then do not download whatever it is.

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Email Delivery Failure Scams

I receive Mail Delivery Failure notices regularly for messages I did not send.

When you get mail from “MAILER-DAEMON” or “Mail Delivery Subsystem” with a subject like “Failed Delivery” or “Unable to Deliver” or “7 Rejected Attempts to Deliver Message” or similar, it means that an email you sent was undeliverable and has been “bounced” back to you.

These may be genuine messages, automatically generated by an error in sending on your email message, but they are often fake and that would indicate a serious problem with hackers and your email address.

If the message is genuine, the most likely reason for a failed delivery is that the email address you entered is invalid. Double-check the spelling of the address you entered or maybe the intended recipient has cancelled that email address.

There are two other main reasons why you might suddenly get a lot of email message delivery failure warnings:-

  1. Your computer has been infected by malware and is being used by criminals to send out mass spam messages without your knowledge. Check your Sent Mail folder to see if this has happened.
  2. A spammer is sending out messages that appear to be from your email address. This is called spoofing and is very common. An expert would see that the emails did not originate with you but most people receiving the messages will blame you and you may get some nasty replies from them.

Spammers send out vast numbers of mail messages, to random email addresses, and that typically means a high rate of failure and hence a lot of failure to deliver messages

If you receive a Mail Deliver Failure notice but have not sent the message, take these steps:-

  1. Change your account password to something more secure. Use a strong password that is easy for you to remember but difficult for other people to guess. (see https://fightback.ninja/how-to-keep-your-passwords-safe/ for further information)
  2. Run a Virus Scan and remove any malware. Make sure your anti-virus is up to date.

There is little you can do to stop hackers faking messages to look like they came from your address, except for deleting the email address so you don’t get any return failure messages.

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Email Predictions

The Radicati Group  www.radicati.com/  carry out research into email usage, security, social networking, web technologies and more.

The information below is from their assessment of world email, covering the period 2019 – 2023.

The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will  exceed 293 billion in 2019, and is forecast to grow to over 347 billion by year-end  2023.

 

 

 

 

 

The number of worldwide email users will top 3.9 billion in 2019, and is expected to grow to  over 4.3 billion by the end of 2023. Over half of the world population uses email in  2019

 

 

 

 

The number of worldwide email accounts is expected to continue to grow at a slightly faster pace than the number of worldwide email users. This is particularly true of consumer email accounts, where many consumers tend to have multiple email accounts for different purposes (e.g. shopping vs. friends and family).

It’s clear that email is here to stay and will only increase in usage and importance.

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The State of Email

The Radicati Group  www.radicati.com/  carry out research into email usage, security, social networking, web technologies and more.

The information below is from their assessment of world email, covering the period 2015 to 2019, but carried out in 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This shows a steady growth in email accounts and email users with an average of just under 2 email accounts per person using email.

The total number of email users by 2019 is just under half of the population of the planet, which shows how incredibly useful email is to most of us.

This is despite the fast rising growth of text messaging, social networking and other forms of communication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This shows the staggering number of email messages sent each day – 205 billion in 2015 rising to 246 billion in 2019 of which roughly half are business communications and half are personal messages.

This means that by 2019 we will be sending approximately 84 email messages per person per day.

Keep on emailing

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Check If Your Email Address Has Been Compromised

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If you want to know if your email address has been compromised in one of the large scale data breaches that you  see in the news, then this website will check for you.

www.haveibeenpwned.com

The guy who created this website is Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director who is well known and highly regarded in the Internet security world.

  1. Why did Troy build the site?
  2. Troy says “This site provides a service to the public. Data breaches are rampant and people don’t appreciate the scale or frequency with which they occur. By aggregating the data here, I hope that it not only helps victims learn of compromises of their accounts, but also highlights the severity of the risks of online attacks on today’s Internet”.

A “breach” is an incident where a hacker illegally obtains data from a vulnerable system, usually by exploiting weaknesses in the software. All of the data in the haveibeenpwned website comes from website breaches which have been made publicly available.

There’s an option on the site to sign up to be notified if your email address comes up in a later breach.

  1. What to do if your email details have been compromised?
  2. This doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has your password but you should check and take precautions.
  • Change the password for the account
  • Change the password for any other account that has the same password
  • Review whether to shut down the relevant accounts and whether there has been any suspicious activity on those accounts ( if there is money involved).

You should always use strong passwords so if you have any less than strong passwords do update them on all relevant accounts.