Use caution with email links and check your anti-virus software
Posted By RichC on October 10, 2012
Knowing that email links can be dangerous isn’t always enough to prevent 
even a relatively experience Internet user 
from occasionally being suckered into clicking embedded links in emails. It happened to me yesterday morning with a bogus Skype Voicemail notification (below). Emails can seem legitimate and be over looked if you’re not paying close attention … or just get careless. “What was I thinking?”
Anyway, use my mistake as a reminder to check on your anti-virus protection. It should always be running on your computer (and other Internet connected devices) as well as remaining up-to-date with the current virus definitions. I can vouch for Avast as an excellent free product that runs relatively quietly in the background … most of the time. It certainly did its job this morning. Whew!
Manually checking emailed and embedded links:
Hover over or copy the link that you are tempted to click and check to be sure the URL for the site is the site you want to go to. Read it carefully as some links are very close to what you might expect. Some email clients make this easy (Mozilla Thunderbird example above), other require a copy and paste method as a way to check.
An image of this morning close call. Thanks Avast!
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