Alert! Fake Gmail Account Verification

There is a fake Gmail Account Verification email is going around. Please make sure you double check before you enter logging details. Let's look at some simple steps where you can identify whether it is fake or genuine email and steps you can take in a case you have already given out your username and password.

Creating a fake login is one of the simplest and effective ways of hacking a gmail, msn, yahoo or any email account password. It dose not involve much programming or hacking knowladge. Attacker will fool you to steal your user name and password. I will show you how you can identify such fake emails and protect your username and password.

Lets have a quick look at a fake Gmail Account Verification I have received.

At a glance, you will not find much difference. Specially Gmail hides the senders email address. So you will see senders display name, Subject and email body, which sounds like a genuine email from Gmail team. 

As soon as an email ask you to provide username and password (for any account) , bank account details or any sensitive information you should go through the following step. 

1. Check the Senders email address. Check whether it is coming from genuine domain name. If the email is from your bank email address need to be from bank website domain or related domain name. In this example email came from a  domain name which is not related to Google or Gmail. Definitely, this email is fake and you do not even need to check further. However, do not forget there are ways to change the senders email address as well. In this case the attacker was not intelligent enough to change the email. 

2. If the senders email address seems to be ok them move to the links provided in the email body. Normally attacker would direct you to a website or ask you to reply to the email. In this scenario, they have given a link.  It looks like it is from Google but once it is clicked it actually goes to a different domain name, which is not Gmail. So, do not type your username and the password. 

In case they have ask you to reply back to an email, you can check the reply to address. It is hard to fake the reply to address, Because, they wants you to send the login details to one of their accounts. 

3. Thirdly you can check the website they have provided and find out the differences. However, that might not be a good idea. Anyways, first thing I have noticed is that even though I am logged into Gmail when I click on the link it did not log me in automatically. 

Finally, make sure you do not send usernames, passwords bank account details or any personal details to strangers. 

Cannot Attach a file to an email in iPad

This is another small but stupid limitations in iPad. This is the Apple way and it is really working for Apple and nobody really worry about it or complain about it. If someone complain about it they he/she is a wired person. Anyways lets see the quick solutions to email attachment problem in iPad until Apple provide a upgrade.
If you receive a email with an attachment then you can forward the message with or without the Attachment. So you can attach a file and send a email from your MAC Computer or even Windows computer to iPad and then you will be able to add and send the email attachment from your iPad. This is a bit funny solution just like one we provided for the iPhone SMS forwarding problem we had initially.

Apple has a strong App Community, which can provide any kind of solution for the Apple limitations. GoodReader is a better solutions for email attachment problem as well as viewing Windows files and any large PDFs without any problem.

Similar to the Recall feature in Outlook?

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Undo Send

Gmail recently added UNDO sent feature. Very interesting!

But I wonder if this is similar to the recall feature in Outlook which can be cheated. i.e. The recipient can still read the email sent.

Use outlook to send email from any email account

I have notice outlook have this funny email hack that allows you to send emails from any email address you want. It can be your friends email address or billgates@microsoft.com or any email address you can think of.

How it works?

First you should have a POP3 enabled email account. If do not have POP3 enabled email account, you can create one from Gmail for free. Set up your POP3 account to work with Outlook and I am not going to tell how to set up an email account in outlook here.

Then you need to do a simple change which will let you email from any email you want to.

Go to Tools >
Email Accounts >
View Email Accounts Details >

Then change your name and Email Address as shown in the picture.

 How simple is that. I think this is not a big security issue but someone can misuse it. Please do not misuse it but you can have bit of fun. This works in all Outllook versions.