I’m sure you are all know what phishing is, where you get a seemingly legitimate email from someone like PayPal or eBay trying to get you to login to your account via an email, but actually you are being shown a fake page simply designed to collect your login details.

Well today I got something similar, only this one is being sent by possibly the laziest scammer ever. The person (or persons) haven’t got the skills to create a fake page, instead they simply sent the email I’ve copied below :-

– Start Paste –

The Helpdesk Program that periodically checks the size of your e-mail space is sending you
this information. The program runs weekly to ensure your inbox does not grow too large, thus
preventing you from receiving or sending new e-mail. As this message is being sent, you have
18 megabytes (MB) or more stored in your inbox. To help us reset your space in our database,
please enter your current user name (_________________) password (_______________)

You will receive a periodic alert if your inbox size is between 18 and 20 MB. If your inbox
size is 20 MB, a program on your Webmail will move your oldest e-mails to a folder in your
home directory to ensure you can continue receiving incoming e-mail. You will be notified this
has taken place.

If your inbox grows to 25 MB, you will be unable to receive new e-mail and it will be returned
to sender. All this is programmed to ensure your e-mail continues to function well.

Thank you for your cooperation.
Help Desk

– End Paste –

The subject of the email was - Your Account Expire in 2 Day(s)

So not only is the subject grammatically incorrect, and the from address is way too generic (Administrator ), but they are really insulting people’s intelligence if they think someone is going to WRITE their username and password and send it back to them as an email !!

Of course they’ve been even more stupid and haven’t even indicated what service they are from. So either they are just collecting username/password combinations to use in brute force attacks (actually quite likely) or they forgot to ask.

I hope none of my readers are ever stupid enough to fall for a scam like this.

Surf Safe,

The Idiot

Eventually everyone I knew (just about) jumped onto Facebook and I started to see the power that microblogging (as some people refer to Twitter) could be…. but I still wasn’t really convinced.

Fast forward and it became obvious that everyone and their clown fish is starting to use Twitter for marketing, so I finally decided to try using Twitter myself to promote some of my sites.

That was when I ran into trouble…. you see like most online services they really don’t want you to have more than one account and I didn’t realise just how hard it would be to manage multiple Twitter identities.

I’ve tried all the tools out there to manage Twitter accounts and none of them really seem to work how I want them to. However, I have figured out few things that might help other people in the same boat.

First of all Twitterfox - the twitter addon for Firefox does let you add multiple accounts and switch between them fairly painlessly.

And Tweetdeck although it doesn’t let you have multiple accounts all open at the same time, does let you sort people into groups… so with a bit of planning you can use one Twitter account for multiple things that way… not a perfect solution, especially if some of what you do is stuff you don’t want certain people to know about…

To be honest I still don’t get Twitter… we had the same (actually better) functionality with majordomo mailing lists way back in 1992 and with that you could use the same client (outlook for example) to manage multiple lists without a problem….. Twitter puts so many limitations on what you can do it just seems like a huge step backwards.

Now I need for big G to be nice and index the site for me

It’s me The Idiot back online, it’s been a while I know… that’s one reason I call myself an Idiot
(with a capital “I”).

I have been having all sorts of issues over the past few months and when I get time (and feel a bit more motivated) I will write about what’s been going on, in the meantime I’m here to promote a few new sites I’ve just put online. Might as well try and help Google find them with a bit of link love

They are all fairly extensive sites full of articles on the chosen subject, at the moment only monetized with Adsense but that may change when and if they get indexed and start to see some traffic.

An Acne resource site
An Advertising resource site
An Aerobics & Cardio resource site
Resources for making Affiliate Revenues
Alternative Medicine resources
Resources about Auctions

That’s six new sites (out of 150 I have under construction), I’m hoping to add about 10 a day for the next 2 weeks.

Going to be interesting to see if they get indexed and make any money…. knowing my luck they won’t and it will back to the drawing board.

The worst thing about being offline is that most of the things I do such as gmail and blogging require that you are actually online to do them. At least that was what I thought, until a friend told me about the new Gmail Offline option which means you can Read, Reply and Compose emails offline and then when you connect to the net everything gets synchronized. Just being able to use email offline has been a real lifesaver.

So I thought, surely there must be an offline editor for posting to a wordpress blog ? And this morning I found one. It’s called Blogdesk and runs as a client on your PC. I have only just installed it so this is my first test run. You can configure as many blogs as you want, it seems to support most common blogging platforms (not just Wordpress) and when you configure a blog it downloads all the categories for you so you know where the posts will end up. Other options (for WP) are to allow comments, allow pings, Publish after upload, change the date and time and add in Trackbacks. It seems pretty damn good so far.

Of course there will still be times when I’ll need to be online to do posts, for example if I want to reference other links or find other information, but as a stopgap until I get a proper internet connection BlogDesk looks like its going to fill an important gap in my life.