Was this a scam?

It’s tempting but it tells them your email address is live, so better to bin them straight away.

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Thus confirming they they have reached a valid email address which they can then sell to others. Just delete any scam emails - don’t engage at all.

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Bataille!

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Would you believe it - just received this scam email, which I’ve had 2 or 3 times before.

This is a little bit of a myth these days - spammers really don’t care if their databases are full of old, invalid email addresses - it costs essentially nothing to send out 100’s of 1000’s of emails per day - only the ones that hit the mark are of any interest to the originator.

If you are worried about “revealing” your email address then set up a gmail account and “reply” to their email from there, deleting the account afterwards.

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I do like the gmail address for response - as if :rofl:

I was about to say the same thing. As fonctionnaires we aren’t allowed to use anything but our official email addresses.

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Seriously though I am considerably more aware these days that immigrants are much more vulnerable to this sort of thing - the glaring errors in grammar are not so obvious if you are using a second (or third or fourth) language and the little things which aren’t right culturally (such as that use of a gmail address) are much harder to spot.

There is another, but not so obvious giveaway, perhaps, is that this is not a document – it’s a jpg photo. On a document, that email address would have been live, in blue, so clicking on it would set up your email for a response. As on a genuine official document.

Mickey.Mouse@disney.com? :slight_smile:

On the odd occasion some outfit is insisting on an email address, even if the outfit is legit just overstepping the mark, I’ve been known to enter f***off@noneofyourbusiness.com without the asterisks.

Thanks for the advice Brian & vero, but my email address has been the same, and openly visible on my cat charity website, since around 2008, and longer, and nothing bad has happened, just the Microsoft phone calls.

I’ve not answered my phone for several years and I’m still getting daily unwanted calls.

Can’t escape, but doesn’t concern me anymore.

This is absolutely fine, as long as you have a journaling file system. Even if you don’t, most modern filing systems can cope with this. Not the problem ot once was.
I’ve done a lot of work on this sort of thing with PVRs. Thing is, people don’t look on a PVR as a computer, so it has to be absolutely rock solid if someone just pulls the plug. In the early days, we used FAT32 type file systems which had to be heavily modified to not fall in a heap if someone just pulled the plug. After that, we moved to XFS, which is a rock solid journaling file system that was designed with video streaming and editing in mind.

Which is the same point I made earlier - though I assumed most people would not know what a filesystem journal was or does (but the intent is to protect against e.g. losing power in the middle of a set of disk operations).

NTFS is a journaled file system (as are most “modern” filesystems) and has been the default on Windows since XT (and Windows NT before that - but that did not tend to be an OS used on home PCs).

My late wife’s email address gets them regularly and she passed away in 2013.