In the first activity, I learned about etiquette in emails. Most of the times when addressing teachers/professors, I’m not sure how to start off the email since usually they never tell us if we can call them Mr/Mrs/Ms. [insert last name]. I think learning how to use etiquette in emails can be very useful since in the future, I may need to email someone important about a job or a question on whatever I’m working on and I need to know how not to sound like I’m talking to them as if they are a friend (especially if I used the shortcuts for words like “u” (short for “you”) or “r” (short for “are”) or “b” (short for “be”)). The other thing that I learned was safety. In the past, I’ve been gullible to emails like these promising a “free” iPad or phone. I would also “subscribe” to many random sources, which probably also didn’t really help. So I would get a lot of emails. I never really checked my spam folder before, so on the occasions that I did, I’ve had more than just a few hundred. It’s been a while since I last fell for those tricks, but I still get a lot of spam email. I think it was good to learn that they can look official because now I’ll know to be more cautious about emails that do look official. It’ll help in the future so that I won’t fall for those tricks or scams.
In the third activity that I did, I learned about using a client for emails. I used Thunderbird, and I got to learn how to use Thunderbird. It was my first time using an email client so it was interesting to learn about and use. This could be helpful in the future because it gives me another option to accessing my emails without having to open up an entirely new window in a browser, and logging in to my email.
In the fourth activity, I learned about spoofing. I found this to be kind of unsettling just because people can “forge” those emails to make them seem official. It was nice to learn about the different things that can indicate it isn’t the person. It was interesting to learn that they can look very close to the regular email, and how where the placing of the email address can be suspicious. The other thing I also learned, which I found interesting, was how a fake email was sent in 2013 about Samsung buying a company. In the future, this can all be helpful to know because stated earlier, it’ll help me be more cautious of emails. I usually don’t check any emails that really aren’t relevant to what I’m looking for (such as bank statement emails, confirmation of purchases, replies from people, etc) so most of the time I don’t end up opening emails that aren’t relevant to what I am looking for. But sometimes I go through to clean my emails and I’ll come across emails with addresses that I’m not familiar with. So it’ll help me know that it’s likely just a spoofed email or spam.