This sent in from Joe Molitor........


The following is from the Cornell Publications Web Site:

How to pay for things on the internet while using your credit card with some safety...

There are two areas of concern when you make the decision to pay online with your credit card. First, you have to make certain the site accepting your credit card is secure. There are two clues to security. One is in the URL or site address found at the top of the browser. Normally the URL begins with http://www etc. but a secure site has a different beginning. It starts with https://www. etc. The "S" means the site is using encryption software and it is pretty safe to send your card information to the company. By the way, do not send your credit card information in an email. Emails are NOT secure!

Of course, the second consideration has to do with what the company does with the information, the company integrity. If the company is located in Nigeria and you are sending money to "the government" to pay taxes on the $2,000,000 you won in their very generous random lottery, well, go ahead, you are a lost cause and I cannot help you. The point is to be careful about companies you never heard of before, don't know where they are located and the website has no telephone number. Caveat emptor, buyer beware. That is one of the reasons I like to pay with Paypal. When you do that you are giving only an email address to the company, not your credit card number

Good information for us all! This was sent to the Web Editor from our good friend Gillian in Estepona

How to forward e-mails?

Every time you forward an e-mail there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses & names. As these messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for someone to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every E-mail address that has come across his computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send Junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit.

How do you stop it? Some easy steps:

(1) When you forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top). It only takes a second. You MUST click the "Forward" button first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and headers of the message. If you don't click on "Forward" first, you won't be able to edit the message at all.

(2) Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the To: or Cc: fields for adding e-mail addresses. Always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This way the people you send to will only see their own e-mail address. If you don't see your BCC: option click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: at the bottom of the list and that's it. When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say "Undisclosed Recipients" in the "TO:" field of the people who receive it. If that phrase does not appear, type your own email address in the "TO" field, but put everyone else's in the BCC field.

(3) Remove any "FW:" in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling.

(4) ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual e-mail you are reading. Ever get those e-mails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual page you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open many e-mails just to see what you sent. (AMEN!) If you can't forward from that page, "Copy" the info and then open a new e-mail blank page and "Paste".

(5) Have you ever had an e-mail that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10 or 15 people or your entire address book. The e-mail can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and e-mail addresses.

A FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient. Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and e-mail address on a petition. (Actually, if you think about it, who is supposed to send the petition in to whatever cause it supports? Don't believe the ones that say that the e-mail is being traced, it just isn't so!)

One of the main most hated are the ones that say that something like, - If you Send this to X people, you'll see something great run across yourscreen. Or sometimes they just tease you by saying something really cute will happen. It's NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!!!!! Don't let the bad luck ones scare you either, they get binned. Before you forward an warning or A/V Alert (or some of the other ones floating around nowadays) check them out before you forward them. Most of them are junk mail that are circling the net! Just about everything you receive in an e-mail that is in question can be checked out at Snopes. Just go to http://www.snopes.com/ It is really easy to findout if it is real or not. If it is not, please don't pass it on.