If you’re like me, you get lots of spam, and a lot of it harbors a malicious intent.  People are constantly trying to get me to cough up user ids and passwords, bank accounts, or unwittingly install malware on my computer.  I’m pretty skeptical about email and so far (knock on wood) I’ve managed to avoid falling for them.

Don’t click!!!

For the most part, that’s not hard to do.  Most people sending phishing email do an incredibly bad job of mimicking the real thing, so it usually doesn’t look good.  Every once in a while one looks really good, but that just gets me more excited to find its tell. And they all have tells … which means that, if you’re really good at looking for them, and extremely diligent, you should never fall victim to one of these scams.

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In late 1986, the White House was on the cusp of a huge scandal involving Iran-Contra, a complicated and illegal program to sell arms to Iran and route the proceeds to the Contras, a guerrilla organization dedicated to the overthrow of Nicaragua’s leftist, Sandinista regime. To try to destroy incriminating evidence, National Security Advisor John Poindexter and his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North shredded the paper trail and methodically set out to delete all of their emails related to the program.  When done, they felt confident that they had erased anything that could have tied them and the White House to the illegal program. But that was a false confidence.

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A while back, I noticed something strange — I couldn’t log into the Messages program on my Mac Mini.  The Messages program interacts with iMessage, which means you can use it to send (essentially) text messages to any iPhone or iPad.  It’s great when communicating with people who are using iPhones because you have the full computer keyboard and display to use instead of an iDevice’s more limited capabilities.

But all of a sudden a while back, when I tried to log into Messages, it just spun and spun and spun but never got anywhere — just on the Mac Mini.  On my MacBook Air, it still worked perfectly fine.  I tried all the various solutions I found on the net — deleting various files and directories, logging in and out of accounts, etc.  But nothing worked … until … well, a story first.

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