Phishing is the term used for attempts to get you to reveal your passwords or other privileged information with email that threatens to disable or otherwise interfere with your account if you don't furnish the desired information either in email or by clicking on a link to a site they control.
It's common for the people who do this to disguise their mail (or their web site) to make it appear that it's from someone you trust. It's also commonplace for them to tailor it to the address that they're sending to. That is, if they're sending to an address @panix.com they are likely to make it appear that it's from Panix, or have the subject line refer to Panix accounts, or something of the sort.
Panix staff will never ask you to send your address in email, and will ask you to enter it only on one of our secure servers. Indeed, we remind our users never to put their passwords, credit card data, or other sensitive information into email, because that is not secure.
Often, users express some surprise that we don't post warnings about these phishing attempts when we hear of them. The reason is that if we undertake to warn folks whenever we spot such an attempt we will
We wish there were some means of preventing these, or of locating the perpetrators and having them punished, but currently there are no effective steps that we can take.
Instead, we tell our users the following:
Any mail purporting to be from us that does not include a staffer's name is probably bogus, and if it asks that you email us your password you can be sure it's a phishing attempt, but you should feel free to check with us if you're in doubt.
(Side note: You shouldn't feel that you need to pass specimens along to us, although we don't mind your doing it. Most of the time, we get them ourselves.)
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