I got an email from Rotary International the other day. As incoming president of Albany Rotary, I can expect to get these things, this one was reminding me of a membership goal form I need to prepare as part of the runup to becoming president in July.
Unfortunately, as someone who has been involved in EMail for a long time, I have to say that this particular message was more than a little weak when it came to best practices. I don't think this is entirely Rotary's fault, i place most of the blame on Blue Hornet, their EMail Service Provider (ESP), a group that has been around for a while and is supposed to know better than to do what they did.
How did I become aware of the problem? Well, the email client I use, Thunderbird, warned me the email from rotary might be a scam. Why did it do that? The message included a link to the pdf on the rotary site, which in the message, looked like http://www.rotary.org/RIdocuments/en_pdf/membership_club_goal_form_en.pdf. The problem was that secretly the link was really http://echo4.bluehornet.com/ct/10998940:13419053082:m:1:995605161:6ADF5EA5CA9CE09181F7544C92C68802
Why is this a problem? Basically, much if not most of the scam email in the world uses the trick of showing one link and really going to another. This is why Thunderbird calls it out and warns you about these messages.
I'm really disappointed, this is stupid and unnecessary, and I have no idea how hard it's going to be to get this fixed. And it needs to be fixed...
