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Old 04-08-2014, 01:43 PM   #23745
DMcCunney
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel View Post
One of the things I learned to do a long, long time ago was set my email readers to use Plain Text mode. All those links? You can suddenly see where they REALLY go.

It may not make for pretty email, and you'll miss some of the cat pictures, but it is the simplest, cheapest, and one of the most effective ways to use email safely.
I've used plain text mode from the beginning. As a matter of principle, if you can't express your point in plain text, HTML or the like won't help you.

Setting your email client to always use plain text can be fun. At a prior employer, I set up Outlook to do so, and was nonplussed when a list I was on that required plain text posting complained about mine. It seemed that while I had Outlook properly configured, Outlook talked to Exchange Server, and Exchange Server was undoing my efforts before sending the mail. The Exchange Admin had to dig to find out where to fix that. (Outlook Express could be forced to display incoming mail as plain text. Full Outlook made that trickier.)

These days I use Gmail as my primary email account. Gmail's filters are the best I've seen, and spam and phishes all get flagged and labeled as Spam, and never appear in my Inbox. I prefer the browser interface, I don't need a local copy of mail and Gmail implements viewers for most common attachment types, so my mail and any attachments live on Gmail's servers, and never actually reach my machine.)

An additional security measure I recommend if you use Windows is to change the default behavior of hiding extensions of known file types. One of the primary vectors for exploits is malicious email attachments. If "Hide extensions for known file types" is on, you don't know that Cute Kitten Picture.jpg attached to your mail is actually Cute Kitten Picture.jpg.exe, because the exe extensions is hidden, and you click to see it, well...

(To change that behavior, in Windows Explorer, click Tools and select Folder Options. In Folder Options select the View tab. Under Advanced Options, uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types".)
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Dennis
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