I have to say, this one surprised me in that it's pretty well done.  Smartermail sorted it into my sales folder, as it should and when I opened the message I was wondering why the heck someone here at Virtual Density would have ordered a cell phone on our Amazon account and then I looked more carefully at the message.

Have you gotten this email saying  "We could not deliver your parcel"?  I've seen a couple of variants pretending to be from FedEx and from UPS and I'll wager there are others out there.  I've gotten it with different wording, too.  They're all crap.

How many emails do you get per day?  How many email addresses do you have?  I've got three mailboxes that I check on a daily basis and there are at least another two that I don't check all the time and I get hundreds of email messages every single day.

We got a call today from a panicked customer today.  He said, "Microsoft called me today and I gave them access to my office computer and my home computer...." 

No, Microsoft didn't call you.  I wrote about this in May and it's still true in December.

What is email archiving?  

It's the act of preserving and making searchable all email to/from an individual. Email archiving solutions capture email content either directly from the email application itself or during transport.  So, if you delete an email, intentionally or unintentionally, it's still safely tucked away and available.

Straight from my junk mail folder comes this email "Notice of appearance in Court" complete with a .zip file attachment that, allegedly, is the court order.

I don't know about you, but the only time I've been in a court is as a potential juror but still I can tell there are several issues that should tip you off that this is spam and likely infected with something nasty.

A client forwarded this message about his mailbox to me this morning.  

Like all the rest of us, this client is busy.  He's on the road more than he's in his office and he reads most of his email on his phone.  So, he probably didn't notice the sender's email address.

A neighbor and client was just in my office to tell me that Microsoft called her yesterday. I cringed.

She told me about how quickly the man spoke, how many technical terms he bandied about, how knowledgeable he seemed, and how he even transferred her to a supervisor.

It's an easy trap to fall into.  Using your work email address for personal correspondence is wrong, though.  Just as you wouldn't mix your business banking with your personal banking, you should take care to keep your personal and your business emails separate.