Excellent Article on Organizing E-mail

Small things sometimes amuse me. For example, I've never titled a post where each word begins with a vowel. I think this comes from all the genealogy work I've been doing lately...and certainly from the BU course that I finished a couple off months ago. Attention to detail. I try not to let anything get past me. The problem is that most of what doesn't get past me isn't worth taking note of anyway, the title of this post for example!

But there's a link to an article in the Deseret News, Slat Lake City, Utah that I spotted and you should find interesting:

Genealogy: How to organize and manage your genealogy email

I hope you find it useful and interesting! I certainly did...

Dangerous Spam E-Mail!

WARNING! I just got an e-mail allegedly from PayPal. It stated that they had successfully changed my address. The "new" address was somewhere in California. Has nothing to do with me. There was a ZIP file attached which I DID NOT OPEN! I'm sure there a virus or a trojan buried in there somewhere. On closer inspection of the originating e-mail, it came from "help -at- notify.paylap.com" [I replaced the @ with at to prevent an e-mail address popping up] which could easily be mistaken for a legitimate e-mail from "help -at- notify.paypal.com" Can you spot the difference? I couldn't delete this one fast enough!!!

Here's a screen shot of the body of the e-mail

[caption id="attachment_485" align="alignnone" width="300"] SPAM e-mail with ZIP file attached[/caption]

bogus e-mails, spam and various other nefarious internet activity!

For those who've attended my classes, you'll know that in spite of the subject matter (genealogy) I always include some cursory mention of internet security, especially with regard to e-mail.  Here's a great article from Leo Notenboom who writes a column about all things related to computers and the internet: Ask Leo

This article has to do with passwords...How to create them...How to remember them...  It's not very technical so it's easy to understand as are most of Leo's articles.  As a matter of fact, you might consider subscribing.  The article also has links to other articles he's written about password security and other issues.

He's got great credentials in that he was a Microsoft programmer for many years.  That alone gives him the scoop on many of our challenges with our computers, software, hardware, etc.  He's also been writing these helpfull articles for about 9 or 10 years.

So, I suggest you take a look and I'm sure there'll be something helpful here for everybody.

When it comes to passwords, I usually put the sites I like to use into my favorites.  When I add a site that is password protected, I change the name of the site by right clicking the name, then I click "RENAME" from the dropdown menu.  Now you're going to think that I just type in the password to make it easy, right?  WRONG!!  I type in a password hint.  I'm never sure of what can be hacked and since a "FAVORITES" list lives in a file somewhere, that, too, can be hacked.  So, the "real" password is never there, but enough info so that I can figure out what it really is.  Hey, it works for me!!