Beware the Fedex Shipment Notification Scam

In GMail I believe you have to open an email first then you will see the sender and sender's addy. To the right of that you will see the time the mail was sent. To the right of "that" you will see a box with 2 arrows (one is "reply" the other is "more" when you hover over them. Under "More", you will choose "Show Original" and the new window will be the Full Headers. Just open a new window and google "email trace" and you will get a link to ip-adress.org or .com either one will work. Just copy the header and paste it into the open field in the email trace window and click "Trace" or "Trace Email" or whichever and it will resolve the header to where ever the mail originated from, or at least the last hop it took to get to you. If you trace some of the other ip addy's in the header you will often find that the mail bounced around the globe a bit before it came to you. I don't think you can get the full header of a mail w/out opening it in gmail. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. In Yahoo Mail you can just Check mark the mail in question and click the "More actions for selected mail(s)", and select "View Full Header". Hope this helps.

Mine say that they're from USPS, with whom I Do have an online account which I use quite frequently for ebay business.

I usually opt to phone the PO (or paypal or ebay or whoever) to get verification.

Dear Bob,

maybe if you had explained how you
knew from what was in the "view email headers" that made you so certain that it was a scam - from that confusing mass of information - the rest of us would also know what to look for ?

Hi,
Just my four penny worth.
Two weeks ago my daughter was expecting a package from China, a replacement for a faulty electronic device.
She received an email telling her that the tracking number for her package was in the attached pdf.She clicked......at this point she lost all control of her laptop.
Even on reboot she was unable to revert to an earlier restore. Fortunately we have the System Repair disk (SRD) for Win7 32 bit.
This enabled us to go back to an earlier restore point, without loss of data.
The offending email was then deleted. She now has her own SRD, and is schooled in the art of using it for such events.
Bob, could you see your way to documenting "How to use your System Repair Disk".
My thoughts, it should be Computer User 101!
best wishes
Steve

If I get a suspect email that I'm not sure of. I cut and paste the Subect, from the email into Google. This usually show up the scam and its history.

I received an email a week ago claiming that my Amazon order had been shipped. I had not ordered anything so deleted the email, but if someone orders frequently from Amazon, they might not think twice about opening that and providing information.

Regarding this previous comment and Bob's reply

"Sorry to have to correct you, but nowadays the shippers ARE sending delivery notification via email. Not on every delivery, but more often than not, it seems. I just got one two days ago, and before that about a week ago.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, but to the sender only, right?"

I have found more and more that eBay sellers have their UPS label printing set up so that UPS do indeed receive my email address and send me genuine notifications. I don't like it, but sellers I have contacted just act as if I am weird, which, of course, I am :-) and just don't understand why I don't want my eBay email address shared this way :-(

I have trained myself to never click a link in an email even if I believe I know who sent the message.

This proved invaluable recently when I received many emails supposedly from different friends, that contained a link. Checking this out I found their address lists had been hacked.

Many believed their facebook account had been hacked, and their friends list used, but I don't know how valid that is.

I believe if I had clicked on the links I would soon have wished I had not.

I use Outlook for mail, and check headers on any questionable e-mails without opening the message. In my previous version I could right click the unopened message and select options, which showed the headers without opening the message. It was a little trickier finding how to do it in Outlook 2101, but now I have a button on my Quick Access toolbar.

Before deleting any messages that I consider to be phishing or spam, I report them to my ISP and to the domain from whom they appear to be coming. For example, if the mail appears to come from a Yahoo address, I forward it to my ISP and to "abuse@yahoo.com". They can close an offending account. Often it's a bogus address, but they need to know that, too.

In Outlook 2010 there is an option to "Forward as Attachment", so I never have to open the actual message in order to forward it.

I don't use web-based mail enough to know what to do, but I'm sure Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc have some provision for viewing headers without actually opening the e-mail.

What I get are notices that "my package" could not be delivered. Same thing, slightly different approach. Except that I hadn't sent anything recently. Some of the really original scams I save to a separate file, for future chuckles in reading them!