HITman Services Clifton Park Computer Repair » E-mail address

Legitimate Marketing or Email Blunder?

HMLaVine — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:09:55 +0000

Earlier today I received an email from a local company. The email had a Word document attached, labeled flyer. It was from a local business trying to generate additional sales. While creating sales is certainly very legitimate, the approach the sender took was not.

As I never gave my permission for this company to send me an email, this could be considered spam. Second, instead of using an email system such as Constant Contact, they simply entered everyone’s names from their address book. And they used the To: field, further exposing everyone’s email addresses.

It is perplexing that in this day and age, people still don’t know how to properly use email for legitimate, responsible marketing purposes.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so astonished, as just the other day I saw several Facebook posts using a combination of text language, and a bad case of grammar, making the post unpleasant to read.

Incoming search terms:

viewing profile e-mail address: very

Insidious Spam Designed to Look Real

HMLaVine — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:13:48 +0000

Earlier today a client from Clifton Park called in concerning an email message they did not send. When we connected with their desktop we discovered a new spam message disguised to look legitimate.

The email comes from Mail Delivery and shows Subsystem Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

The email contains an attachment which holds the payload. The attachment is called Forwarded Message.html

The body of the email message is as follows, (we substituted the email address):

Note: Forwarded message is attached.

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

name@domain.com

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

If you get a message like this, delete it.

“Stupid Company” Procedures

HMLaVine — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:50:34 +0000

Part of my job at HITman Services is researching software at our Clifton Park office.

Over the weekend I was trying out some new BlackBerry apps. One which I thought was very interesting was Visible Vote. I signed up for an account and started using the application.

Shortly thereafter I received an email from the company with my user name and password in the email. I was under the impression that the practice of sending passwords in emails ended years ago, but obviously I was wrong.

When I sign up with companies I am not familiar with or whose security procedures I am unsure of, I use a throw-away password. Which in this case turned out to be the right thing to do.

I sent the company an email regarding their antiquated security methods, and have yet to hear back.