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How do I Determine if an Email is Safe?
Email "from" addresses are easily forged. Use common sense before opening ANY attachment or clicking ANY links in messages.
According to the CERT Coordination Center at the Software Engineering Institute, operated by Carnegie Mellon University, you should only trust a message that passes all of these tests:
- The Know test: Is the email from someone that you know?
- The Received test: Have you received email from this sender before?
- The Expect test: Were you expecting email with an attachment from this sender?
- The Sense test: Does email from the sender with the contents as described in the Subject line and the name of the attachment(s) make sense?
For example, would you expect the sender-- let's say your Mother-- to send you an email message with the Subject line "Here you have, ;o)" that contains a message with attachment-- let's say "AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs"? A message like that probably doesn't make sense. In fact, it happens to be an instance of the Anna Kournikova worm, and reading it can damage your system.
Learn more about email safety, read: http://www.cert.org/homeusers/email-attachments.html