PetreyDish.Com

FoursquareFor Your Business

Foursquare is yet another social media that has a lot of users. If you are part of the crowd that has heard of it and aren’t sure what it is, here is a quick description. You “follow” your friends who are also on foursquare and see where they go, literally. You can check into different places - gas station, house, bar, office, bank, highway, etc. You get points for “checking in” and earn “awards.” “Tips” can be left by anyone, anywhere and are made public.

BUT!! If you are a business, you can “claim” your business on this social network and whenever someone checks in at your business, you can offer your customer a special. One restaurant that I checked in at offered a free appetizer to the “Mayor” (the person that has checked in the most at the location. Mayorships are public). Express Auto Center in Chester is currently offering $5 off any service if you check in. Just show your phone to the person at the counter, and you’re done! Discount is given! When your customer checks in, all their “friends” see the check in - YOUR BUSINESS. If you sync your Am-Ex card with foursquare, then you get discounts at many different businesses, like Panera Bread Co.

I call foursquare a low maintenance social media. As a business owner, you don’t have to pay attention to it until you are ready to change your discount, if you want to change it at all. I also think that it’s user-friendly.

Spoofed Emails II

My passwords are pretty complicated, yet somehow I kept getting emails from “myself” selling Rolex watches. (Someone was spoofing my account.) I called my hosting provider and allowed them to access my email. They reviewed the information and blocked the IP address. To be on the safe side, yet again, I changed my complicated password to another complicated password and have yet to receive another email from “myself”.

Lesson learned, if changing your password doesn’t make you feel protected enough, contact your hosting provider and see about blocking the spoofers.

Spoofed Emails - Scams and Spams

Spoofed emails are emails that look like they come from a legit account (maybe even your own business account but didn’t)

Here is a list of helpful articles I found and read that I thought could benefit others.

What Is Email Spoofing

How to Stop Spoofed Emails

Taken from an article I found by www.explorehacking.com:

How to identify whether an email is real or spoofed ?

It can be done by checking headers. Email headers is simply the text which contains the information about the mail servers that the email encountered in its path from the sender to receiver. It contains a lot of other information too.
Note: I am just telling you a few points about this so that you would just get an idea about the approach. This may or may not depend on some factors.

We can view email headers in gmail by clicking at ‘show orignal’, in yahoo by clicking at ‘Full headers’ and such kinds of options in other email service providers.

If  you get an email displaying sender’s email like someone@gmail.com, someone@hotmail.com, someone@yahoo.com . Then it should be orignated from gmail,hotmail and yahoo servers respectively. But if it doesn’t, the most probably the email would be fake. 

I will show you by an example, I received three emails in my gmail inbox from sender’s address “someone@gmail.com.”  Sender’s address shows me that they should have been orignated from gmail/google server, if they would be real.

Note : There is a field called “Return-path” in headers.  If the email ID shown in this field and email ID you get as sender’s email ID doesnt match, then the email is surely fake.