Crabby Monday tip: Call someone out on their big fish story

Today's tip isn't really about Office, per se; it's about the deluge of phishing scams flooding your Hotmail, Live, or MSN inboxes—and how can fight back, one message at a time.

 She doesn't appear to be a burglar, a thief, a scammer, does she? Didn't your mother ever tell you to NOT judge a book by its cover???

Briefly about phishing: Phishing scams try to lure you into giving out personal information for identity theft. Any email you get about foreign lotteries, about an online merchant needing you to update your personal information, or about money in Nigeria that someone needs help getting out of the country is a phishing scam. Don't bite the phishing line; you will look phoolish and may never phorgive yourself (and you may end up pierced by a painful hook, inflicting  injury to your mouth and your credit score).

In the past month, I've sent out more than 20 spam notices to the Hotmail, Live, and MSN security teams that handle this. Now, I've been on email for  very long time and so I've gotten thousands of stupid, useless messages (even from friends but that is another topic for another day) but for some reason, I reached some sort of boiling point a few weeks ago; a line was crossed and I was out for blood.

I looked all over the web to see where to send my grievances to and found these addresses:

• Hotmail: report_spam@hotmail.com
• MSN: report_spam@msn.com
• Live: report_spam@live.com

I forwarded the offending messages to the spam-reporting address at Hotmail (where my Crabby email address is hosted - MSFTCrabby@hotmail.com) and received a response almost immediately. Grace, the Hotmail tech who was assigned to my case, asked me to please forward the entire header of the phishing message so that she could investigate. She gave me these instructions:

1. Open the that stinky, putrid, rotting phishing message that you received.
2. Click on the small drop-down arrow beside the "Reply" link. The "Reply" link should appear at the upper right hand side of the e-mail just below the date
3. Choose "View message source." 
4. Copy the entire message source.
5. Click "Forward."
6. Copy and paste the contents into the body of the email (above the original message).
7. Use the appropriate address form above.

Now I know what the message source is (it contains a lot of information, such as where the mail came from, the server it used, its IP address, and so on) but when viewing the message in Outlook, there was no "small drop down arrow" to click. I realized that Grace was talking about when you're viewing the the message in the web browser, on the Hotmail site. So, I opened up the browser copied and pasted the message source, and forwarded the message on, and exactly one day later, I received a note from Grace saying the offending email account had been shut down. Success! Don't mess with the Crabby!

But this got me thinking: What if you don't know that Grace was giving instructions for grabbing the message source in the browser version of your mail? I don't want you to give up on reporting this trash only because you can't figure out how to get to the message source from Outlook. There IS a way to be able to view the message source in Outlook messages but it involves changing a registry key, which I don't recommend. What I Do recommend is going to your Hotmail, MSN, or Live account in your web browser and then following the seven-step instructions.

 And why this post today? Maybe if we all took the time to report these annoyances—or at least some of them—they'd become less active and successful...or maybe I'm deluding myself. Whatever the case, know that you DO have the option to report it and it may make you feel better (and ruin someone's big fish story).

— Crabby