A post on Shak & Jill became part of an in-depth article published by the Christian Science Monitor today.  Reporter Chris Gaylord talked about my experience with an email greeting card that ultimately didn’t open, but his article set off even more alarms for me,

One suspicious e-card crawling the Web this year tries to exploit users’ feistier side. When opened, the e-mail loads an image of a rascal throwing a snowball at your screen. "You have just been hit with an e-mail snowball!" reads the card, which Symantec included in its December spam report. The card tells readers to forward it on to friends and share the fun.

The snowball card itself is harmless, but it’s likely part of a larger scheme. "Each time the e-mail is read, a request is sent to the server hosting the image, and the user’s e-mail address is stored … on the spammer’s server," says the Symantec report. So, next time the spammer wants to send out junk mail, he has a fresh list of addresses.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve received the email snowball card.  Here’s another scam pointed out by an artist named Chris who described a recent email she received inquiring about some paintings.  Part of what alerted her was the broken English used in the message.

Don’t be paranoid, but be careful when online!