I don’t even have a work one
I was thinking about an iPad?
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just checked our Chromebook - PDFs open natively in a Chrome browser window. You also have access to Google’s set of Office equivs -Docs, Sheets etc- which are free to use.
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Would vote for a chrome book too.
Cheap as chips and will do everything they need very simply.
Had a £150 HP model a couple of months now and it’s been perfect
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Think I mentioned on another thread I’ve been getting these spam mails from Germany (only Germany). The is no identifiable address, except some but not all start with RiBrit and then some nonsense.
I’ve done some filtering and they go straight to the bin. I’m getting about 20 a day now and have no idea how to stop or even how it started. I can’t think of anything remotely German I’ve signed up for.
Short of getting a new email address and starting all over again, any ideas?
Anyone got any idea what’s going on with FB events?Since the clocks went back they’re all showing an hour out despite being correct when you go into them.
I read something that said if you set up them up before the clocks change but they occur after, that caused the issue so I deleted them and set them up again but still the same.
Following on from this, I didn’t get any spam for two days and then saw 18 in the Bin this morning.
I’m sure that somehow I’ve been ‘list bombed’ and been signed up by bots for sub lists. The mails themselves seem most likely to be phishing under the guise of coupons, all from Germany.
No untoward activity in my bank accounts. (I only ever bank via pc and physical token) and as far as I can think, my card is not stored on any accounts (Wiggle etc).
I do have DDs with Virgin, Council Tax, Car Tax (DVLA?) and Voda and my email is associated with some crucial stuff like Gov Gateway and other things need.
I’m considering the logistics of shutting my mail account down completely but first I’d need a new account and resign up for everything, which seems a hassle.
Any suggestions? Do you think the spam will eventually stop or just get worse?
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Spam is just a fact of life. Even if you start with a complete fresh email, eventually it will be found and will be spammed. Especially if you have a standard [firstname].[lastname]@hotmail.com it wont even need to be leaked, it will just get autogenerated and they will try it.
The spam wont stop, it costs nothing to send an email.
Some things you can do. Make sure anything that doesn’t automatically get marked as spam that you select it is spam, this blocks the email address. Never, ever reply to spam or click the unsubscribe. You shouldn’t even read the messages, many have tracking embedded and as soon its rendered on screen, the sender knows someone has opened it If its from a naughty person all you’ve done is confirm the email is live and someone is reading them. Make sure you have a decent Anti Virus system. I used McAfee, it covers my PCs and my phones. It wont stop spam, but its always good to have.
You can put your email in here https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and it will tell you if your email has been leaked. Not much you can do now as its already happened though.
Basically you will just have to put up with it.
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Yeah thanks. That stuff I already know though. As per my other post, this is not general spam, it’s a targetted attack using my email address. Each mail address it comes from is auto bot generated nonsense.
Regular spam I’ve been dealing with for years, no issue. This is a massive increase, only in German and definitely triggered by an ‘event’. they were already going to Spam folder but sometimes there is something in there other than these that I do want to open.
This is why I set up a filter for some key words and now they go to the bin but I still have to empty the bin. That in itself is not an issue, the issue is how did it get to this point. (I’m assuming a site with no DOI or Captcha) and when will it stop. It was a floodgate opening, so obviously associated with one event.
It’s pointless trying to block the mail address as every single address is different and most of of the time just a random list of of numbers and letters, no ‘@’ or anything like that.
I’ve never opened any of them but have hovered over the address. I did read that switching off HTML can help here but I don’t know how to do that in Gmail?
Forgot to add, checked the ‘pwned’ site a couple of times, the only tjing it’s ever flagged was UnderArmour (My Fitness Pal) some time ago and I deleted that account but this was ages ago and this German spam is recent.
I have Malware Bites Premium on the Macbook, it runs in the background but two manual scans show that I’m virus free.
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Nope, can’t use work laptop for anything other than browsing the ‘approved’ sites. Plugging-in or charging anything that isn’t expressly approved = trouble.
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Hmm, I see. It does sound like your email has been validated as being a live email address and then sold to spammers a premium address. How that’s happened I doubt you will ever get to the bottom of. It may well tail off over time if they dont get any bites from you
I wouldn’t worry, its irritating, but I doubt its part of anything more nefarious than just spamming you with shite and probably the odd phishing attempt.
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Was just doing some googling. There was something I saw that I hadn’t considered. If you are being targeted and bombed with spam sometimes that is done to direct attention away from genuine emails. They may have targeted PayPal or something and are trying to confuse you so you dont notice the genuine emails.
Might be worth rotating your passwords on sites. I like to use the Google password manager in Chrome as it will generate strong random passwords and then saved them across devices.
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For some reason e-mails that claim to be from PayPal don’t get moved to spam in my e-mail, I probably get two or three of them a day.
I was a bit taken aback earlier this week to realise I’d got an e-mail that actually was from PayPal!
Just read @GRamsay’ note about directing attention away from PayPal… will go and change that password now (though I think it’s linked to an expired credit card as I’ve not used it in years)
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This is my worry. I don’t have PayPal and no stored cards. I’ve been checking my account. Payments can’t be made from my account without a code from my token but a stored card doesn’t require that of course.
I’ve been emptying the Bin each day but the trouble is that I might actually want to retrieve something I’ve binned by mistake (same with Spam) and I don’t want to open one of these accidentally.
I’ve now set up a folder specifically for them. I will change the filter rules to move them to that folder, rather than just ‘Delete’ (which ends up in ‘Bin’).
It’s pissing me off because of my previous and present roles, I’m always telling Mrs FP to be careful what she signs up to, and it looks like I’ve been the stupid one somewhere along the line!
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one thing I started doing a litle while ago is to use a different e-mail address if buying anything online or subscribing to newsletters etc so that way my main e-mail is just used for private stuff I can control OK or legacy stuff that I’m happy to keep using my main email for.
I have a Google Workspace account and I use a domain name I own for my main mail address - the alternative e-mail is another domain name I own and runs as a 2nd account on Workspace so I can consolidate and manage them together.
you could of course set up another free e-mail account with Gmail or something more secure like Protonmail but for me Workspace works OK and I find Google are very good at keeping spam at bay, and I get very very little
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I’ve always wondered about Google password manager thing but afraid of the unknown. I take it your confident in google saving your password?
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I think Google are far more competent at keeping stuff safe then many of the sites Im entering the passwords into. There are other password managers that keep the data on the machine, but because I use my laptop, work laptop, phone I like them synced in the cloud.
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I use a password protected excel file on one drive. I think/hope the password protection there is robust but could well be wrong.
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It is these days. Back in the old Excel 97/2000 days the password protection was basically useless and you could brute force it open with a VBA script in minutes.
In the modern version of office its encrypted with AES which is basically unbreakable
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It takes long enough to think about opening even with a CAD workstation pc.