Prez. I just received an email supposedly from webmaster@goth.net saying I hadnt been online since Jan 17, and suggesting I sign in with their link. I did not click on the link and as you know I have been here lots of times since jan If you would like a copy of the email i can forward it to you. could it be a just a glitch or worse?

Sandy

I just received one, too, but I deleted it. Good thinking saving yours, Sandy!

Any email sent by the forums themselves will come from forums@goth.net.

However I think these may be authentic - but they came from the GOTH.NET development website, not from the forums. I'll disable email reminders on the dev website to stop this happening in future.

I find there is almost always one good way to figure out if an email is authentically from a website - take the ADDRESS of the link that they are trying to get you to click on (ignoring all other links/images in the email), and verify that that link is actually on the domain you would expect.

For example, make sure the link they WANT you to click on is on matches http://*.goth.net/* (where * can be anything). Don't look at the text, make sure you look at the actual address (which often means you need to right-click and copy address).

PreZ

I right clicked and looked at message source, but since the info was so wrong I decided better safe than sorry. Thanks for the quick reply Prez.

Just so I understand it correctly, if you get a strange email (whether from these fora or another) and you want to check whether the link they want you to click on is really from the website/company/... it appears to be, I right-click the link, and copy it somewhere (but not the url thing in the browser)? And if the name is not correct, then it's fake? Is that the same as "hovering" above it with your mouse to see the link in the lower, left field of my browser and checking it? Because I always do that. What PreZ writes sounds important, but I wasn't sure I understood it completely.

I didn't receive any email from goth.net other than notifications for pm's, by the way.

Pasting a link to a plain text editor (the more primitive, the better) is the safest, there are all kinds of 'escape' character, substations (0 for O, for example) and Unicode tricks that can be played. With the state of malware and social engineering going on, it pays to be paranoid.