Life on the Computer Farm - Hacked! and DigiSignatures

Hacked!

Someone "borrowed" my main email address a couple weeks ago, offering work at home schemes and, i hope, nothing worse.  

It is, of course, a fact of life in the computer age, annoying enough when you get one, worse when someone steals your name.

Then i got an email from a friend with a similar thing & wondered if it came from the virus or whatever that infected me.

And i wondered if i got it from the phishing attempt from awhile back, even though i didn't bite.

Trying to Prevent 

MyGuy, the computer pro, said that i really ought to digitally sign all my emails.  It will help prevent this.

Yeah, right.

i'm sure it is additional protection.  i also know now why so many of us do not use these digital signature keys.

Definitely do not want to use those digital keys.

The first thing it did was lose the formatting in all my pretty emails.  No pictures.  i'm not as into the pictures as many of you, as much as Google says i need to be, but i do like them.  And it all went away.

We changed a preference, and it's back.  (That's from a drop-down menu.)  

But i still have to insert my code several times in an email session before sending.  This is my protection.  It all comes at a price.  And my correspondants should be getting used to the signature at the bottom of my main account emails.

When i use webmail, though, i can't do that.  Too much privacy info entrusted to a public entity.  But i can insert a different sort of digital signature, which was a one-off thing, and i have done it in my gmail account, but haven't found the place yet on my other account.

MyGuy says i need to go back, though, and put some rotating favorite quote in, since most of the hacking is totally robotic.

It's an imperfect system, but it should help.

i hope.  The one with the digitl keys is definitely inconvenient.