by Gerald Bauer, owner of JB Systems

It was recently brought to our attention that some customers were receiving “mock” emails from Charter Communications politely asking users for their email usernames and passwords. The exact email looks something similar to this:
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From: customercare@charter.net [bcc12@rogers.com]

Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 12:35AM

To: customercare@charter.net

Subject: Your Account Update

Dear charter Customer
There are some changes necessary in order to upgrade your e-mail account.Please send us your e-mail
ID and password so that we can upgrade youraccount and avoid any interruption in service.
Thanks,charter Support Team.
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There are several things to note here – such as the improper capitalization of things – but most importantly, review the “To:” address – and note the [bcc12@rogers.com]. This is dangerous – at Outlook will “blind carbon copy” your reply to an address at rogers.com. Do you really think this is Charter Communications? Probably not!

Also – for everyone’s information – Charter would have all the tools necessary (or we hope that they would) to manage their email accounts without soliciting their users for passwords. NO EMAIL PROVIDER SHOULD EVER REQUEST A PASSWORD FROM THEIR CUSTOMER. This is bad practice – and they have the tools to manually reset the passwords if they needed to.

Until next time everyone – have a great holiday and stay safe – both offline and online.