I get spoof emails nearly every day from people pretending to be eBay and asking you to log into your account so they can get hold of your username and password.

I always forward these to spoof@ebay.co.uk which is their recommendation so that they can check whether the email is from them and presumably take action against the people sending these things out.

Recently I received an email from them which was from a seller using the contact a buyer system to tell me he had posted what I had ordered. I didn’t pay too much attention to it at the time and forwarded it to spoof@ebay.com.

Imagine my surprise though when I got an email back from eBay telling me

“Thank you for sending us the email you received. We can confirm that it did NOT originate from eBay or PayPal. The email you received was a “spoof” email.

Please ignore the email and delete it from your email account immediately. Do not reply to it, and do not click on any links or buttons in the email.

What is spoof?

Spoof emails are made to appear as though they have originated from a trustworthy source such as eBay, PayPal, banks or other companies. They aim to obtain sensitive data such as passwords or financial information for fraudulent use. Spoofing is also known as “phishing”, and it is an attempt to steal your identity.”

Are eBay unable to detect messages that actually did send or is this an automated response to anything you send to them?

I find it amazing how I take so many things for granted that only a few years I didn’t even have at all.

I can’t imagine a life without broadband and internet access but you only realize just how much you become dependant on it when it breaks down.

For me that is always going to be an issue as without internet access I can’t work but it doesn’t stop there. You loose the ability to communicate with people by email, no live streaming of Big Brother available, no online shopping or research facilities and the list goes on and on and on.

Our broadband connection stopped working at about 8.30pm on Tuesday. It wasn’t the end of the world as I could logon with T-Mobile through my Sony UX180P.

The next day though was a different matter all together and panic started to set in. I contacted Sky to tell them I couldn’t get on the internet to be told there was a problem with my exchange and the status was ongoing works with no timeframe as to when they would be complete. The best they could offer me was to say “Try it again tomorrow and see if it works”.

So I went to logon through T-Mobile again only to find that I couldn’t. I think I had used all the credit on the pay as you go card.

Now I was totally stuck. I’ve become so dependant on broadband that I don’t even have a modem installed in any of my computers in the house that I can use for dial up. (Might have to get one of those)

I left my computer on and had the router connect page loaded which would try and connect every 30 seconds to the internet and went and did something else.

Every half an hour or so my girlfriend would ask “Is the internet working yet?” to which I replied “No”. The look of horror on her face was funny.

At about 10 pm I heard a noise coming from my office which was Wi-fi bunny telling me it was 10 O’clock. Now for that to have happened we had to be connected. Our ordeal was over!

Luckily it was only a little over 24 hours of down time but it does make you appreciate what you have a hell of a lot more.

I just got an email from the Bank of America telling me they have blocked my account.

Your Online Banking is Blocked

Because of unusual number of invalid login attempts on you account, we had to believe that, their might be some security problem on you account. So we have decided to put an extra verification process to ensure your identity and your account security. Please click on Link Below to continue to the verification process and ensure your account security. It is all about your security. Thank you.

Couldn’t have happened at a worse time of year. Hold on, I don’t have an account at the Bank of America!

I can’t believe people fall for these emails. I guess they must do or these scammers wouldn’t send them out.

Okay, I got a final demand from Talk Talk today that told me if I didn’t pay up within 4 days they would refer my case to a debt collection agency.

Once again I went through the process of calling their Credit Control department to be told they can’t deal with my account and that I would need to speak to customer service. So they put me through to the wrong department and then transferred me to a dead line.

I called again and this time someone was a little more helpful and told me they would arrange for a credit to be raised on my account to zero the balance. When I asked them about the money they owed me they said I would need to speak to customer service. This time I actually got put through to someone but clearly they didn’t understand their own billing system and I kept getting put on hold so they could speak to their supervisor. I was then told they were going to keep the money I had paid them by way of a cancellation fee.

There should be no cancellation fee as I was out of contract and had given more than 30 days notice but this was what the Talk Talk girl was told to say by her supervisor.

I tried to explain to them about my overpayment and eventually they hung up on me. I guess my only option now is to take them to the small claims court. It’s a lot of hassle and the money involved isn’t a great deal but it is the principle of the matter now. Companies like this don’t deserve to be in business. It’s a shame that us Brits have to put up with such crap customer service and it’s annoying that we have come to accept it as well.

I recently bought a Mac Mini and having used a windows PC for quite a long time I had almost 30,000 emails that I needed to import into Mac Mail.

This wasn’t as straight forward as I had hoped it would be and searched around for information on how to do this and had a lot of trouble finding something that worked.

I eventually stumbled across a site Littlemachines.com that sells a low cost program that will convert Outlook PST files into mbox files that can then be easily imported into Mac Mail as well as other mail programs running on Mac OS X.

My Outlook.pst file was just over 500mb in size and running the program it took about 30 minutes to convert all of the data. Then I just selected to import data in the Mac Mail program and after about 1 hour I had all my email loaded into the Mac Mail program.

So if you are looking for a way to convert Outlook files to Mac OS X compatible file then give it a go. It is the best $10 I have spent in a long while.