Hi! Is there an online scanner which can scan an email? One of my email contacts says my emails contain odd little buttons or links (please view screenshot). I can not see the buttons, even if she replies to me. My email is from Centurylink, and I use Thunderbird, not webmail. My OS is Fedora Linux. I have sent test emails to my Gmail account. The buttons do not show up in my Gmail, not even on my phone. I have asked some of my other contacts to look for the buttons in emails which I have sent to them. I am still waiting to hear from them. I plan to wipe my hard drive and re-install fresh copies of everything. Before doing that I would like to know what this is so I can hopefully prevent it from happening again. Have you seen these button things before? Any idea what they are and where they come from? THANKS
I assume you are sending your outbound T-Bird e-mail using POPS or IMAPS? If your outbound e-mail is not being sent via TLS, it is not encrypted and can be intercepted and modified in route.
Thanks a lot, reasonablePrivacy! It looks as though the VT service only scans an attached file. I tried it anyway, attaching a Christmas tree .jpg for the holiday enjoyment of the VT scanners. But the report I received only showed the scan results for the .jpg file. What I was hoping to find is a scanning service which would scan my email itself. I do appreciate your suggestion.
Hi itman. In my Thunderbird settings under Outgoing Server (SMTP) Settings it says: Authentication method: normal password, Connection security: STARTTLS. Does that help? Thank you
My sister wrote back with a short, cryptic reply which seemed to indicate that all of the emails in her Gmail account (not just the ones sent by me) show the strange buttons. I'm still waiting for a confirmation of that. Could the buttons be a feature of Gmail? I guess I should check with a Gmail forum.
Yeah, that's outgoing mail is encrypted. Note that CenturyLink has been having its problems lately; e.g. 911 fiasco. I would suspect their e-mail servers might have been or are compromised. If you are using CenturyLink e-mail, testing with Gmail doesn't prove anything besides that the suspicious e-mail add-ons you noted are not originating from your PC.
Before asking for help at the Gmail forum I decided to try a few more searches. Apparently the mystery buttons really are a new Gmail feature called Smart Reply or Smart Replies. According to the articles I found, Smart Replies are AI-generated auto-replies which are suggested based on the content of the email which the Gmail user has received. So, you need to reply to an email, but you are just too tired or too busy. So you hit one of the Smart Reply buttons and Google sends a reply for you. Yuck! Thanks a lot to everyone who read my help request, and especially, thanks to reasonablePrivacy and itman.
Thanks for that too, itman. I will re-read the email thread here and I will give serious consideration to switching to a more secure email service. Do you have a favorite?
Appears you already have a Gmail account so just set that up in T-Bird. It will handle multiple e-mail source providers.
OK great. I appreciate your help, itman. By the way, I read you guys every night. As you can see from my post count, I keep pretty quiet most of the time.
