Re: Phishing Links

[David Escalante <david.escalante () BC EDU>]

> On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 02:05:41PM -0400, James Farr '05 wrote:
> > It is hard to educate some users on the difference between legitimate
> > and phony web links in email, and it is easy enough to fake a  
> > website.
> > For that reason I would like to propose that no official college
> > communication is sent with an active link in it.

It turns out that several popular mail readers automatically convert  
text that __appears__ to be a web site into a link as a convenience to  
the user.  e.g. If you say, "Get your update at www.microsoft.com"  
then the mail reader when displaying messages as HTML converts that  
text to a link pointing to "http://www.microsoft.com"; on the fly,  
although there is no link in the original text that was sent.  This  
complicates things considerably in relation to the proposal.
--
David Escalante
Boston College