To click or not to click?

[graylocks]

i received an email today and i can't determine if it's real or a phish. i signed into my comcast.net account and there are no warnings. i did send out a mailing last week that i noted some users received with a spam designation.

should i click the link indicated for 3rd party app users or not?

[cyclemax]

I wouldn't click the link. Navigate to Comcast's support page and look for information there.

[wurm]

Looks like the same one I got a few weeks ago, right around the time I started being unable to send mail out. I forget if I clicked the link (I would have checked the url first anyway), but to be safe you might as well follow cyclemax's advice and go through the Comcast site. I know I ended up having to change my outgoing mail port to 587 instead of 25.

[graylocks]

i did go to the comcast site and, other than the fact that they really do sell McAfee, i wasn't able to find anything. maybe i should call customer no-service.

i just checked my mail prefs. outgoing dotmac mail is through 587. my domain name address is set for port 25. my mail seems to be going in/out fine at this point.

[i'm lost]

I'm guessing the one-click fix link requires an ActiveX plugin in IE to work. If you can still send email through an email client, then there's no reason to acknowledge the message. If not, it can't hurt to view the the page with instructions for changing the port that you use. If you're really paranoid about clicking on it still, doing it under a non-administrator account, and maybe with something like NoScript for Firefox, should prevent the page from automatically doing anything bad.

For what it's worth, comcastsupport.com appears to redirect to help.comcast.net.

[Black Landlord]

wurm wrote:
Looks like the same one I got a few weeks ago, right around the time I started being unable to send mail out. I forget if I clicked the link (I would have checked the url first anyway), but to be safe you might as well follow cyclemax's advice and go through the Comcast site. I know I ended up having to change my outgoing mail port to 587 instead of 25.

Does the URL you see at the bottom of your browser window jibe with the urls or links on the page when you cursor over them?
It's not a solid way to confirm a link's validity but it's often a quick way to expose a phony.

[AlphaDog]

Just call. I'm the suspicious type. About a year ago, somebody did snag my e-mail address and used it for spam. I got an e-mail from my ISP, but they did not ask me to click on any links; they included a telephone number and asked me to call for more details. Before I even got the message, I got a telephone call, asking for me to call. The problem was easy to take care of, but the way it was handled left absolutely no question in my mind that I was being asked to contact my ISP about something legitimate.

[Seacrest]

I would click...

The DELETE button, and fuggedaboutit.
The email doesn't really pertain to you as a Mac user in any case.

But in the future, if you need to send mass emails, you might want to consider a service like VerticalResponse, or MailBuild rather than sending through your ISP's SMTP servers.

[Seacrest]

PS: one way to determine a phish or not is to view the source code and/or the full headers of the email.
If the hrefs of the links actually go to different addresses than the text between the tags, it's pretty apparent that the email is bogus.

[graylocks]

Seacrest wrote:
But in the future, if you need to send mass emails, you might want to consider a service like VerticalResponse, or MailBuild rather than sending through your ISP's SMTP servers.

the weird thing is, it wasn't exactly a mass email. it was an html post to a yahoo group i own. i noticed the *SPAM* designation in the subject line of some folks who happened to respond to me.

i actually joined and did consider using VerticalRsponse for this particular mailing. it turned out to be less frustrating for me to design the email independently and send it through yahoo.