Most people don’t really pay much attention to where emails originate from or how they got to be in your inbox. This is clearly exploited by scammers and spammers of all sorts, as many consumers will happily click on a link in a genuine- looking email and not think twice about the fact that it might not be all it seems.
Anti-spam technology has improved a lot in the last decade, so a lot of the obvious junk mail is filtered out before it arrives, or if it makes it as far as your mailbox, it’ll be dropped into your Junk Mail folder. But even though the crooks have gotten more sophisticated, sometimes fishy-looking email is still delivered, but clearly marked as probably not safe, as there are tell-tale signs of it not being genuine.
Here’s an example of a typical “phishing” email that’s trying to lure the recipient into clicking a link to a website they think is their bank, Ebay, PayPal etc. etc.
In this case, the URL is shown at the bottom of the window by hovering over it (the mouse pointer doesn’t show up in the screen capture, but it was over the “Update” button). This doesn’t look like a genuine URL; ditto, anything that is displayed in the text as (for example) https://login.youraccount.com but when you hover, you’ll find it’s some other URL. Some scammers are increasingly using TinyURL, Bit.ly or other URL-shortening services to try to hide their obvious dodginess.
Many email programs (like the standard Windows 8 Mail client) try to hide complexity from end users, but if you hover over a link, it will show the URL in a pop-up.
There are other scenarios, though, where the sender isn’t purporting to be a large institution or other supposedly trustworthy source. Maybe you’re selling something and a potential buyer contacts you to offer a quick cash purchase, sometimes in tandem with an overly complicated arrangement of an agent coming to collect your goods, in exchange for some online means of payment. If your Spidey-sense doesn’t pick up a slightly iffy premise to these kinds of offers, then there might be other ways of tracking down the sender.
Every email comes with an “envelope” – it’s actually like a routing slip attached to the block of data that makes up the main body of the message, and every time a computer (like an internet mail server) handles the message, it adds some kind of marker on the routing slip. The most recent markers on the message “headers” are at the top, so to find out where it really came from, parse down and look for the earliest point in the header that shows where the message originated.
To see the detail on a message, you’ll need to use a mail client such as Outlook or Windows Live Mail (if you’re using Outlook.com/Hotmail etc, or Gmail), and look at the properties of the message.
In Outlook, open the message in its own window, then go into File / Properties and you’ll see Internet Headers – if the message came from outside the company, this is the key to your sleuthing. Select all the text and 
right-click to copy it into the clipboard, and paste it into Notepad for easier viewing.
The header information might be incomprehensible (there are plenty of guides online that can help you make sense, if you’re all that interested), and in fact, much of the text could be faked – but it often gives some interesting breadcrumbs.
Above is the header of a message that’s a tad suspect – viewed in Windows Live Mail (open the message, look in File 
/ Properties and look in the Details tab). Looking down the headers, we can see the message originally was sent to Yahoo, and it was handed over to the Yahoo mail service by the IP address listed:
Received: from [41.220.68.62] by web172005.mail.ir2.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:19:54 BST
The sender, who’s offering to buy a car in this case, purports to be in Aberdeen. Now let’s just see where this address is by pasting the source IP address (41.220 etc) into the box on the top right of www.whatismyipaddress.com – or put the IP address into the URL, like here.
Doesn’t look a lot like Aberdeen, does it?
Another week, another Windows Phone 8.1 (aka Nokia Lumia “
As we’ve 
OneNote and select the Page Templates option. 
Frankly, most of the in-the-box templates looks nice, but they’re a bit rubbish, really. You’ll always have to customise a template to capture just what you want, and do you really need a fancy graphic on the background of every single page in your notebook? 
section to the bits of your notebook you want – by navigating to each section, then going into the Page Templates section as above, and using the Always use a specific template drop-down option at the bottom of the same pane. 
The time of year has rolled around where many of us are travelling – maybe time for a last, late 
referring to them by a code name – Lumia “Black” being the last biggie for Windows Phone 8. The packages are a combination of operating system upgrades (that will be made available to all handset manufacturers) along with Nokia-specific upgrades, which may improve the way their handsets function, either in general or somtimes specific to the new OS version. 
Cyan isn’t a colour that the 
Here’s a screenshot from a recent Lync call – the presenter (whose anonymity has been maintained by blanking out both the content and some other details) shared out the screen to show a dense slide full of charts and small text annotations. 
to hide it. 
F5 like-a-PC-Pro to start a presentation from the beginning, or press 
What’s generally best, of course, but needs a little preparation (and why would anyone want to prepare in advance of a presentation? Answers on a postcard, please), is to upload your slides to the Lync meeting and allow yourself to see your content in a window alongside all the comments coming from the attendees. 
jump back to PowerPoint, open the file you’d otherwise be presenting, then go to the File menu and look for the “Open File Location” link at the bottom right. Right-click on it to Copy path – which will put the location (but not the filename itself) into your clipboard, ready for pasting into the Lync dialog, so you can then upload your slides straight into the meeting. 
As the 
window. 
receiver if you have one. 
ability to talk to the TV to get it to change channel and do other tricks. 
download useful info for you when it recognises someone’s email address on the LI network. Here’s an example before it’s configured – click on the arrow to the right to expand the People Pane for more information. You may even get a notification at this point that LinkedIn is enabled but you need your password to continue. 
Assuming it isn’t enabled yet, the next step is to go into the View tab, look under People Pane and check Account Settings. Tick the LinkedIn box if it’s not already configured, provide your credentials and bingo. 
just hover over the person’s mugshot and you’ll see their details, and click on the down arrow within the contact summary to view their other information – such as phone number, if they’ve published that in LinkedIn and are allowing their network to see it. 
Presumably, we’ve all been on a Lync conference call where there may be a presentation going on and in parallel to the voice conversation, there’s a rampant side-channel of IM traffic which the presenter has no chance of keeping up with or maybe even seeing. One or two company car drivers may have experienced this, recently… Still, it’s not like the old 
If you have your PowerPoint file in email, try dragging it onto your Desktop 
(temporarily), then click on the PowerPoint option under the Manage Presentable Content option within the Lync meeting. Should the file already be somewhere else on your PC, you could navigate to it within Explorer and 
If you’re running a Lync meeting with lots of attendees, then it might make sense to switch off the “meeting IM” noise channel, and instead use a managed Q&A system to collect input from attendees and provide answers that can later be exported and sent around. Start the process by going back into the Manage Presentable Content section and kick off a Q&A (assuming you are a 
presenter) – if you’re in the middle of presenting some other content, this will surface as a tab on the “stage” to the right of the Lync window. Both attendees and presenters can switch between these tabs at will.
don’t interrupt the meeting; attendees can see each other’s questions (and filter out the noise of others to show only their own, important, queries) and presenters can also start & stop the whole Q&A process, resuming meeting IM as appropriate, and can also save a transcript of all the Q&A to distribute later.
Polls also feature in much the same way – similar to Yammer or older LiveMeeting polls, you can 
ask a question and get people to vote on the responses provided – with attendees seeing the Poll show up in the “Presentation” tab, while presenters can manage more options about whether people can see each other’s responses etc.
Just go back into the same menu option as before, and you’ll be able to switch between multiple PPTs or Polls in the “Presentable Content” section.