BigPond Billing Scam Email

Another good email scam, this one purporting to be from BigPond:

Dear Customer,

This e-mail has been sent to you by BigPond to inform you that we were unable to process your most recent payment of bill. This might be due to either of the following reasons:

1. A recent change in your personal information. (eg: billing address, phone)
2. Submitting incorrect information during bill payment process.

Due to this, to ensure that your service is not interrupted, we request you to confirm and update your billing information today by clicking here [note the link: http://tusdrei.de/futtern/telstra.com.au/members/myaccount/LANGUAGE/ECareServ/ID12549JDk23/Online%20Billing.htm].

If you have already confirmed your billing information then please disregard this message as we are processing the changes you have made.

Regards,
BigPond
Billing Department

It looks like the link has already been removed (and it is also flagged by Firefox automatically as a scam site), but I couldn’t find a lot of reference to this email with a Google so I figured this might help other people: it’s definitely a scam/phishing attempt.

How many emails do you send a day?

After reading this thread about the limit BigPond imposes on sending email on regular user accounts (apparently “it’s no more than 25 electronic messages in a period of 10 consecutive minutes and no more than 100 recipients per single message”) I got interested in how much email I send. I certainly feel like I spend all day reading and writing emails, but when I actually crunched the numbers for the last month, I was surprised about how low the volume was – only 286 emails in 30 days.

If anyone cares, this data came from hackily parsing the Outlook Express smtp.log file (which you can enable by going into Tools, then select Options, hit the Maintenance tab, and check the “Mail” box at the bottom under troubleshooting. The log file will end up wherever your .dbx files live – if you can’t find it just search your system for smtp.log.)