RE 'AOL' message - am I being paranoid
 

Tonight both 'er indoors & I received a message purporting to be from AOL telling us that email accessed by accounts using Outlook, Thunderbird etc would need our clients to be modified - click the link. Not at all sure about this.

Part of the headers is thus:
Received: from service09.goodmailsystems.com (service.goodmailsystems.com [72.5.68.89]) by gmc-da04.mx.aol.com for [my email address] 29 Jan 2010 18:15:04 -0000

Are my suspicions justified, d'ye think?

In this instance you are probably incorrect (assuming you actually have an email account withAOL!!!), although your paranoia level is healthy!

It looks like AOL is instituting some form of certified email, hence the requirement to modify your client / access mechanism.

Goodmail Systems Home Page, Home of CertifiedEmail. Creating Trust in Email.

But it always pays to log in directly to your account, not via the link in the email, to corroborate the email and ascertain the details.

SD

You are absolutely right to be cautious.

I would never, ever, whatsoever click on a link in an e-mail like that.
If I thought what it said was credible, I'd go to a known and trusted link to their website and take a look from there.

Yes, you're right that I have an a/c with AOL. Like a poster on another thread, I've never had problems with them and get a solid 7+Meg download. However... I wasted a morning doing just that, but the AOL site is such a mess that I couldn't find anything relevant. (link probably hidden among the adverts.) So...

I fired up the 'doesn't matter if it crashes' old lappy and clicked the link, and it seems to be honest, just encouraging people to tidy up their internet settings. Since W7 blessit created the log-on stuff for me automatically, I seem already to have what they recommend.

Anyhoo, the change in policy seems to be targetted for Tuesday, so we shall see...

jim, got the email too as i have an AOHell account, what it says is that if you use a client (eg MS outlook) to read and access your email, you need to adjust the settings in order to archive emails as AoHell wont be storing them on their server ad-infinitum as they do at the moment. ie they will be deleted after 30 days.

for me, the email makes no odds as i do this already and archive all my emails and have done so since 2003 through my aol hell account and business server.

if you just discard emails after reading then you can ignore, if you like to archive then you have to set a rule in the client to copy emails sent and recieved to be copied to a file (*.pst).