With the holiday season upon us, people will be sending their greetings via paper and electronic greeting cards. While paper cards will consist majority of this tradition, ecards have their places. Sending ecards are much more environment friendly. It is also economical, particularly during our current financial downturn.

However, there are a few precaution that one needs to be aware of when one receives ecards.

• Make sure you recognize the sender’s name. The sender’s FULL name should ALWAYS be included in the subject line (and sometimes in the “from” field) of the email.
• The web site should be easily identified in one or more of the following places: the “from” field, the subject line, or in the email itself.
• Do NOT click any links with simple IP address. In a fake ecard email, the IP address may be hidden and can only be seen by hovering your cursor over the link or right clicking on the link to view properties. The link should not be a series of number (e.g. 169.180.1.15, commonly referred to as an IP address).
• An ecard email should NOT have any attachment of any kind. The recipient will go to the web site to “pick up” (i.e. view) the ecard.
• Legitimate ecard emails will always include an option to pick up the ecard by typing the web site address and enter a code.
• Use a webmail or email application that has good spam filter. My experience with Gmail has been very good. It filters out almost all spam mail.

Let me know if you have any other tips that I am missing here.