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Another +1 for Mailwasher. It deletes stuff you don’t want while it is still on the server, so it never gets downloaded to your email client. It will show you a list of all the emails waiting, and you decide if each one is good or spam. It has a “learning” feature, so that similar emails in the future will be automatically marked as good or spam, and you can set up filters based on email address, the “From” line, the Subject line, the actual contents of the email, and a number of other factors . For a known source of spam, you can set it to silently delete in the background so you never even see those emails. But it does put deleted emails in a “recycle bin”, so if something gets deleted that you really wanted, it can be retrieved. Check it out at http://www.firetrust.com/en/products/mailwasher-pro.

I’ve used MW pretty much since it was first released and endorse the positive comments made by other posters.

However, the one option that has not been mentioned is the ability to read the message headers that you otherwise never see in email programs. I regularly get emails from unknown persons in various countries contacting me in relation to my business but many ‘unknowns’ can either be spam, malicious software and not genuine client enquiries.

They don’t always get flagged as spam, so I open up ‘Email/Preview Message’ to check, thenif I am still uncertain after that, I open ‘View Complete Header’ and look through the otherwise non-viewable data. If in doubt I record the URL, delete the incoming message without downloading then email the alleged sender and ask for more details, all of which I can read from the server.

These features make it easy to see which emails are malicious and what I call the ‘Double Dot’ hiding of a malicious executable behind a normal file is shown up in all its twisted glory. Typical examples are XYZ.pdf.zip, XYZ.doc.zip and XYZ.jpg.exe (where ‘XYZ’ is usually an innocent-looking file name).

Cross fingers, but I’ve not been caught out for some years.

Cheers

Billy

I only ever copy original files to removable media, and even then, not until I have confirmed that I have the right file version i.e with the most recent save date/time. For very important documents such as reports, I keep the last two edit-iterations as [filename]-1.doc and [filename]-2.doc plus the ready to go version as file name-[Final].doc.

Why? Because I have been caught out by careless fingers in the past and it has cost me dearly.

The horse may have bolted in this instance (though I have recovered fragments of lost files sufficient to reconstruct the original document by phrase-searching the entire drive with ZTree, which is a hugely underrated utility with many time and life-saving features, then copying/pasting the text into Word and reassembling.

Billy

Does anyone know how to change a black background/white font pdf to white background/black font?

This may be a slow process, but it will produce the outcome that you seek.

1) Save each page of the document as an image file.

2) Open each page in turn in an image editor and change it to negative. I use Irfanview which is a free download and the commands are just that: select Image on the toolbar and click on negative.

You can then convert the images back to a single PDF file.

Cheers

Billy

Tell ’em you have a MAC, that stops them in their tracks every time, or that you don’t have a computer.

I’m in New Zealand and I had a flood of about 12-15 calls over a short period but they have since virtually stopped. The last was a few weeks back, a woman with the usual accent and when I told her I didn’t have a computer she just hung up.

Incidentally, whistle blowing is no more than an irritant, a phone cannot transfer that volume and you are more likely to hurt your own ears.

Cheers

Billy