Beware of Norton from Symantec email
I received an email Wednesday that looked like it came from Symantec, the maker of Norton Anti-Virus and other security software. I have used their products in the past, (I still use Norton Ghost occasionally), but don’t care for their anti-virus and internet security products, and considered clicking on the “unsubscribe” link to stop receiving emails from them. Before I did I decided to do a little investigation. Using Outlook I right-clicked on the message listing, then clicked on “Message Options.” That opens a new dialog box labled “Message Options” which has the header of the email, showing who really sent the message, and all the stops it took to get to me. I noticed that the real sender of the email was norton.rsys1.com. Still looks legit, but I decided to do a little more investigation. I ran a whois check, which tells me who owns the domain. Nothing from symantec appeared. So I visited one of my best friends, google, and discovered that rsys1.com has many partners, not only norton.rsys1.com, but also resp.bppr.com, alm.rsys1.com, my.orbitz.com, info.realtor.com. In other words, this company is a marketer of other company’s products, and what I received was an unsolicited email from them, or what we call spam. I did not click the link in the email to unsubscribe, which would just prove to them that my email address was legit, and that then they could harvest my email to other marketers, but instead forwarded the email to spam@uce.gov which is the email address for the government’s anti-spam office at the FTC.
Hopefully this post will show others how to avoid helping spammers, some of the biggest jerks on the planet.
