Time to go Anti-viral?

[d.dimitroff]

Hello again,

I will repeat my message that I originally sent to my ISP as follows:

"Yesterday, while in my Mac email service small symbols appeared beside each email account that I have with this service (indicating the account not connected  ~).

A pop-up window appeared several times asking for my log-in password and my email accounts. This was wrongly provided and the ISP email service resumed.

This same sequence happened a few months before but I did not respond and it went away.

I notified the ISP the first instance but no satisfactory answer except that they were having email "issues".

This was the reason for me giving the second occurrence the info ... I thought the ISP was asking for the info. No more ISP discussion except to reassure me that all was secure at their end. I was concerned that someone was interfering with my accounts  with or without their knowledge.

I know this is a lot of detail and perhaps I am beginning to obsess about security a bit, but the reason I left Windows XP was because in spite of care there were many problems.

I realize there are no guarantees and that the system is vunerable at many points.

Beside the usual activities involved it occurs to me there may be stalkers.

Dan D

[Dan Millar]

I think you can relax - those of us with Sympatico accounts will recognize the scenario you describe to a tee. This happens sporadically with them, and probably other ISPs who resell sympatico, and what you describe is exactly what most of us will have seem many times. It seems their mail servers occasionally get bogged, and just can't respond to your email clients request to communicate in a timely manner, so Mail, the Mac email program, will give up so you can get on with fixing the problem or waiting until the server is less busy. As a remedial step, Mail takes the troubled account offline - hence the ~ symbol. Re-connecting when the server is available will usually result in Sympatico's servers requesting your password before reconnecting. Mail should be able to reply to this request without user input, but I think a combination of security policies and sympatico strangeness forces you to t-y-p-e t-h-e p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d one more time. It's NOT a breach.

Welcome to Macintosh. We don't need no steenking AV software!

Seriously though, with all the protection you have now, and a Mac, you can relax. I know its hard to believe, but once you've gone a year or two without a single security issue, you'll really start to enjoy what Mac users have always enjoyed - computers that just work.

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan