Jump to content
British Coin Forum - Predecimal.com

50 Years of RotographicCoinpublications.com A Rotographic Imprint. Price guide reference book publishers since 1959. Lots of books on coins, banknotes and medals. Please visit and like Coin Publications on Facebook for offers and updates.

Coin Publications on Facebook

   Rotographic    

The current range of books. Click the image above to see them on Amazon (printed and Kindle format). More info on coinpublications.com

predecimal.comPredecimal.com. One of the most popular websites on British pre-decimal coins, with hundreds of coins for sale, advice for beginners and interesting information.

Rob

Help for the digitally challenged please

Recommended Posts

I had AVG on the computer. It has been quite quiet for a few years, but this month I've had a large upturn in the number of emails rejected by others that purport to come from me. This Jenny Downing was the only obvious anomaly as I have never heard of her(?) and I don't use flickr, so thought it might have got through when viewing an image.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If something is reading your email address book, and sending out these emails, definitely a bot.

I had a similar problem a few years back and changed all my email addresses by adding an asterix on the front of each, that renders the email address useless, definitely need to run Anti Virus, it should locate and remove the bot

Edited by Chingford

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
28 minutes ago, Chingford said:

If something is reading your email address book, and sending out these emails, definitely a bot.

I had a similar problem a few years back and changed all my email addresses by adding an asterix on the front of each, that renders the email address useless, definitely need to run Anti Virus, it should locate and remove the bot

Unfortunately I don't have an email address book. I have lost the contact details previously saved in outlook every time the computer gets upgraded and I can't see a way to safely save them. Anything important I now write down.

I am currently trying to rationalise my emails in outlook, but have 10-15000 to sift through. Then I will have to go back to btyahoo and do the same :( Trying to save the relevant emails in a sensible archive structure is a bugger too. So much easier saving word documents.

Hopefully one of the deleted items will solve the problem. Hope springs eternal.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It could be a bot or some other form of malware, but to be honest it has all the hallmarks of a spammer who has spoofed your e mail address and the undelivered messages are backscatter from that.

I agree about running a virus check, and I'd also as a matter of urgency, change your password and e mail account name.  

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Firstly, it isn't easy nor necessarily desirable to change my email address because I have customers from the last 20 years who know the contact details. Coins aside, I don't have a website for my businesses, so these non coin contacts would probably be lost in any change because of their inability to find me.

btyahoo insisted on us changing the passwords a month or so ago on the grounds that their systems had been hacked. It got to the point that you couldn't login until they were changed. Didn't have any problems before that. :(

I can honestly say that if there was an easy method of transferring all the emails to a different place, I would dump BT. I just don't fancy forwarding over 10000 emails. I'll be pushing up the daisies by the time the list is exhausted.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
11 minutes ago, Rob said:

Firstly, it isn't easy nor necessarily desirable to change my email address because I have customers from the last 20 years who know the contact details. Coins aside, I don't have a website for my businesses, so these non coin contacts would probably be lost in any change because of their inability to find me.

btyahoo insisted on us changing the passwords a month or so ago on the grounds that their systems had been hacked. It got to the point that you couldn't login until they were changed. Didn't have any problems before that. :(

I can honestly say that if there was an easy method of transferring all the emails to a different place, I would dump BT. I just don't fancy forwarding over 10000 emails. I'll be pushing up the daisies by the time the list is exhausted.

To compromise you could set up an entirely new account, and keep your old one running as an essentially defunct account, but one you could still keep checking. You could use a web based e mail account such as hotmail, who now call themselves "outlook" and are a lot better than they used to be, or g mail. 

Just change your advertised e mail address to the new one so that more and more customers get used to it. But you would still have the reassurance that the old one isn't dead in case any long standing customers send to that.  

Why don't you have a website, out of interest?  

   

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

As far as bulk transfer of many thousands of e mails from one platform to another is concerned, experience has shown me that this is always a king sized pain in the arse.  

However, you might find this link useful.  

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks.

Number 1 set up a gmail account, but isn't this account type something to do with cloud things where you give the info to a third party and so is inherently insecure being in the public domain? Unfortunately, I would also need more than one account. Business names are relatively easy being as you can't have two identically registered busnesses, but the same can't be said for private individuals. I'm grateful I am not a John Smith. Best I keep plodding on for the immediate future.

Business doesn't have a website because marketing and advertising was limited to two days visiting half a dozen people in January 1987. Since then it has been word of mouth. I'm still here, but winding down, so a website is not necessary.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
42 minutes ago, Rob said:

Thanks.

Number 1 set up a gmail account, but isn't this account type something to do with cloud things where you give the info to a third party and so is inherently insecure being in the public domain? Unfortunately, I would also need more than one account. Business names are relatively easy being as you can't have two identically registered busnesses, but the same can't be said for private individuals. I'm grateful I am not a John Smith. Best I keep plodding on for the immediate future.

Business doesn't have a website because marketing and advertising was limited to two days visiting half a dozen people in January 1987. Since then it has been word of mouth. I'm still here, but winding down, so a website is not necessary.

Yes, it does use the so called "cloud", which is just a somewhat confusing name for personal stuff being stored on various third party servers who lease out space to domain owners. The obvious idea is that you either don't have a hard drive for personal storage, or if you do, space on it is saved, because your documents are stored elsewhere.

It's OK for unimportant material, but there's no way I'd trust it with anything important. Quite apart from information being compromised by hostile elements, there's always the possibility that something will go badly wrong and whatever you have there will be lost.        

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I recommend that you scan your computer with Malwarebytes, it's free and one of the best at finding and removing malware.  It's a premium trial and features are time-limited, but just let it do its thing and then remove it if you wish.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
19 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

Yes, it does use the so called "cloud", which is just a somewhat confusing name for personal stuff being stored on various third party servers who lease out space to domain owners. The obvious idea is that you either don't have a hard drive for personal storage, or if you do, space on it is saved, because your documents are stored elsewhere.

It's OK for unimportant material, but there's no way I'd trust it with anything important. Quite apart from information being compromised by hostile elements, there's always the possibility that something will go badly wrong and whatever you have there will be lost.        

To be fair regarding cloud I sell both AWS (Amazon) and Oracle cloud as well as traditional infrastructure and the security applied to cloud is far beyond anything most home user's would have. Also, for corporate use, the information is usually replicated to a minimum of 2 other site's meaning three copies. In the event of a who data centre going down there would be the other copies located elsewhere. Virtually every bit of information you now give to your bank, gas company etc etc is stored in the cloud in one way or another.

Edited by Nonmortuus

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
57 minutes ago, Nonmortuus said:

To be fair regarding cloud I sell both AWS (Amazon) and Oracle cloud as well as traditional infrastructure and the security applied to cloud is far beyond anything most home user's would have. Also, for corporate use, the information is usually replicated to a minimum of 2 other site's meaning three copies. In the event of a who data centre going down there would be the other copies located elsewhere. Virtually every bit of information you now give to your bank, gas company etc etc is stored in the cloud in one way or another.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not decrying cloud per se. It's a fantastic resource, and I know that the storage is replicated.

But anything that I personally consider valuable, gets stored on a memory stick and held in a place only I know about. It's probably my suspicious and sceptical nature that's at the root of it :ph34r:     

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
29 minutes ago, 1949threepence said:

Don't get me wrong. I'm not decrying cloud per se. It's a fantastic resource, and I know that the storage is replicated.

But anything that I personally consider valuable, gets stored on a memory stick and held in a place only I know about. It's probably my suspicious and sceptical nature that's at the root of it :ph34r:     

I don't blame you, I had the same stance until I saw the sheer amount of security around the commercial cloud offerings. It is obviously in their interest to keep your data safe, one significant breach and the cloud bubble bursts!

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here's a fun link for you lot;

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

It'll tell you if your email address have ever been compromised and sometimes where as well.

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
4 hours ago, Nordle11 said:

It'll tell you if your email address have ever been compromised and sometimes where as well.

Or is it just an email address harvester...

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Just now, Nick said:

Or is it just an email address harvester...

No, it only checks if your account has been compromised.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
On 26/02/2017 at 0:28 PM, Nonmortuus said:

I don't blame you, I had the same stance until I saw the sheer amount of security around the commercial cloud offerings. It is obviously in their interest to keep your data safe, one significant breach and the cloud bubble bursts!

Thanks chaps.

When you say commercial data is backed up a few times, does that apply to private/small business data too? That matters if security and backup are not deemed to be particularly important. Most businesses are small and do not have in house IT departments with significant infrastructure, but the loss of info would arguably have a much greater effect.

Edited by Rob

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, Rob said:

Thanks chaps.

When you say commercial data is backed up a few times, does that apply to private/small business data too? That matters if security and backup are not deemed to be particularly important. Most businesses are small and do not have in house IT departments with significant infrastructure, but the loss of info would arguably have a much greater effect.

Amazon had a cloud issue yesterday, which caused considerable disruption - link 

 

Quote

 

Amazon Web Services is scrambling to recover from a cockup at its facility in Virginia, US, that is causing its S3 cloud storage to fail.

The internet giant has yet to reveal the cause of the breakdown, which is plaguing storage buckets hosted in the US-East-1 region. The malady kicked off around 0944 Pacific Time (1744 UTC) today.

It has led to major websites and services – including Imgur, Medium and the Docker Registry Hub – falling offline, losing images, or left running like treacle. We're also hearing loads of media titles that use S3 to serve pictures, plus Runkeeper, Trello, and Yahoo webmail, are all suffering: basically, this outage has knackered half the internet, it seems, because it all relies on S3 to store data online.

Just to stress: this is one S3 region that has become inaccessible, yet web apps are tripping up and vanishing as their backend evaporates away.

AWS, for some reason, insists this isn't an "outage" but rather a case of "increased error rates" for its most popular cloud service. Infuriatingly, the status dashboard for AWS shows all green ticks at time of writing, despite what feels like a chunk of the internet going missing as a result of the downtime.

 

Draw your own conclusions about trusting anything important to the cloud.   

 

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, Rob said:

Thanks chaps.

When you say commercial data is backed up a few times, does that apply to private/small business data too? That matters if security and backup are not deemed to be particularly important. Most businesses are small and do not have in house IT departments with significant infrastructure, but the loss of info would arguably have a much greater effect.

It will totally depends on the level of service you signed up for with AWS/Oracle/Azure etc.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Help!! I've hit something and don't know what. Not looking good.

Trying to write a document in word, but now it puts a line through changes and highlights in red and it puts a vertical line by the side. I can't get rid of it, nor do a copy and paste to show a picture. How do I get rid of it without discarding the whole document and losing pages of data :(  If I can't get rid I've just wasted 4 hours. It also came up with lots of red boxes and horizontal lines if that helps. Everything I write is now in red, despite changing the colour to black - to no avail.

Thanks.

Edited by Rob

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think you have somehow switched track changes on, it's switched on and off in the Review tab.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 minutes ago, Sleepy said:

I think you have somehow switched track changes on, it's switched on and off in the Review tab.

Thanks. I think that's it, but I didn't hit the boxes at the top. Don't know why? Presumably it's a case of hitting two keys at once.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
7 hours ago, Rob said:

It's not straightforward, but the image reference is contained in the source of the page.  Here's the image for the link you supplied:

BH134.jpg

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks Nick. Any expansion on what I have to do? If not, this will be an ongoing job for willing volunteers.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×