Yesterday I had written a post about an email which pretends to be from Gmail team, which requested information about account details, browsers etc. you can read it here: Gmail Phishing Scam in Circulation Do not Reply

Today I received another email regarding the same, but the style of convincing to reply looks a little official. This is the email which I received:

Gmail is experiencing congestion causing slow network due to unused accounts registerred by most of our Users. Google Team want to remove/eliminate all unused/unwanted accounts.

Gmail also want to know how often you use your Account . Send us your domain login below for verification and for your account not to be shut down unexpectedly.

Account:
Password:
Birth date:
Country:

Warning!!!   Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Thanks Gmail!

G MAI L BETA

Have you noticed something, there are spelling and grammatical mistakes in the message. (I do not think that Gmail team will hire a 10 grade kid to write and send warning emails on their behalf ) They wanted to know how often I use my Gmail account, what a silly question? They already know how often and from which geographic locations (IPs) I login, which browser, operating system I use and more..

In the previous email, I tried to track the sender’s IP, and it was located at some place in South Africa.

In today’s email I tried to track the return path. Have a look below what I got
Return-Path: <karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com>
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com designates 10.239.193.19 as permitted sender) client-ip=10.239.193.19;Authentication-Results: mr.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com designates 10.239.193.19 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com; dkim=pass header.i=karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com
Received: from mr.google.com ([10.239.193.19])
Sender: karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com
Received: by 10.239.193.19 with SMTP id g19mt77889hbi.207.1264948501790;

It is a little technical jargon, but we are not going to mess with it. The things important for us are the Return-Path (which is karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com)

I just Googled the email id karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com, and look what I found

When you will visit first 2, 3 listing you can easily find that the email belongs to KARPOFF AFFILIATES LLC.

Visit here: http://www.dealmakers.net/ads/ad_det.asp?id=1554 and you can get the whole picture.

So after doing all these research I am still unsure whether these emails are being sent by Gmail these, or some scammers.

But for your own safety, DO NOT REPLY.

Hope you all have found this post useful.

What is your opinion on this, please post in comments.

Do not forget to follow me on Twitter for updates.

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I received a message couple of days before which claimed to be from Gmail accounts department, stating that my account has been automatically chosen for permanent deletion and I must reply with some information like account name, password, date of birth, country for verification. If I fail to so they will delete my account permanently within a week.

Just have a look what I have got.

From: Gmail <account-support@gmeasdcenter.com>
Reply-to:  Gmail <verifyscecences@gmail.com>
To:  accounts@google.com
Date: Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 5:26 AM
Subject            : Your Account

We are shutting down some email accounts and your account was automatically chosen to be deleted. If you are still interested in using our email service please fill in the space below for verification purpose by clicking the reply button. Learn more

Account:
Password:
Birth date:
Country:

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Thank you for using Gmail!

The Gmail Team

GMAIL

Some of my fiends also reported the same issue, in addition to the above information they were also asked to provide:

Please Also Include:

Operating system (e.g. WinXP):
Program and version you use to access Gmail (e.g. Internet Explorer 7 or Outlook 2003):
Your antivirus software (e.g. Norton 2007):
Any extensions, toolbars or plug-ins:

A thought struck in my mind that why would Gmail need my password, if they want to verify my account they could do it by using phone verification or some other method and why would they need the data about my operating system, my browser, my antivirus software and other stuff, when they can easily track it (and they do it for sure ).

So I gave a deeper look to the email and I found that the originating IP of the email was 41.19.212.145, and when I traced back the IP, see what got.

Tracing was done through a proxy which is situated on a server in US. So the map shows, starting from location India to the proxy in US and then to the IP which is being traced.

It was from some unknown location in Africa, now I was wondering that when Gmail shifted their headquarters to Africa and are they recruiting tribals as their operating staff.

So beware and do not reply to such emails and need not to be panic.

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Are you an Adsense publisher and suffering from low eCPM, commonly known as smart pricing? Many of the Adsense publishers suffer from the same issue.

For new ones in the industry, eCPM or effective cost per mille refers to the revenue earned per thousand impressions of ads.

Means eCPM = (Total earnings/Impressions) x 1000

Total Earnings = Number of Clicks x Cost Per Click (CPC)

Higher Page Views = Higher Impressions

Today we will discuss about some steps to increase your ecpm. Increasing ecpm mainly revolves around showing high CPC ads and increasing number of clicks. So how can you do the same thing in your Adsense account?

Choosing high paying keywords: The first step to increase your Adsense earning is to use high paying keywords (keywords which have high average CPC), keywords with average CPC higher than $4 pays well. You will find some low paying and some high paying keywords in the same niche, select high paying ones

For an example: In dog training niche, some keywords like

have average CPC well above $5

whereas keywords like

have average CPC less than $1

So you can now easily decide which keywords to choose for your articles.

Some of you will be thinking that “High Paying Keywords have very high Competition”, and it will be damn hard to rank with those keywords on search engines. Yes you are right.

Here comes a unique strategy, leverage both high paying and low paying long tail keywords.

What does it mean?

It means do not leave those low paying keywords all together, instead leverage them. I will explain how.

In starting keep the ratio of high paying to low paying keywords, 3:7, means for every 10 articles you write, write 3 articles using high paying keywords and 7 using low paying long tail keywords which are easy to rank in search engines.

In this way you can bring traffic to your website, which will also be presented with the articles (which are of high paying keywords) and hence with high paying ads.

Using this strategy, after some time when you start getting steady traffic and stability in search engines, you can increase the ratio to 50:50 and later 70:30.

But I must remind you that this process is time consuming and needs lot of patience. On an average it takes around 10 to 12 months.

I would recommend to follow the first phase for 6 months, the second phase for another 6 month and then third phase after that.

And do not forget to keep your efforts ongoing with link building and all other stuffs because merely choosing high paying keywords is not enough.

Use less ad blocks: Adsense allows 3 ad units and 3 link units for content per page. But it does not mean that you shall use all. In my experience, use 2 ad units and 3 link units. Using less ad units will make the chances higher that Google serves only highest paying ads and this way you can get higher price per click.

Also integrate Google Adsense for search, which can fetch little bit more revenue for you.

They have their own policy. Complete details can be found here:

Google Adsense Program Policies

Proper Ad Placement: Proper placement of ad blocks are of prime importance, it will help in increasing your Click through Rate (CTR) .One big ad unit must be place above the fold (the webpage area which user views without scrolling down). Use Google heat map for finding prime areas for placing your Adsense ad units.

The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance).

I think this article will help you in increasing your Adsense income, you will have to wait a little for part 2.

Do you have some other solutions and recommendations, please post it in comments….

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Couple of weeks ago Google China (Google.cn) reported that several attempts has been made to hack their security infrastructure, whose origin has been tracked to mainland China. Google is now investigating whether any of their insiders was involved in the cyber attacks which it faced in mid December.

The sources, who are familiar with the situation, said the attack, which targeted people who have access to specific parts of Google networks, may have been facilitated by people working in Google China’s office

After this announcement many Gmail users found that their account has been compromised. Many journalists reported the same issue. One journalist reported that Email messages from his account were being forwarded to an email address that the reporter did not recognize. The reporter said that other people the reporter knew in Beijing had suffered the same kind of attack, though none of the forwarding addresses were the same.

Worried about the practice of self-censorship of its Chinese language search engine Google.cn, the search giant said that it will talk to government authorities and if nothing.

Now someone needs to tell them ALL IS WELL

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Google Earth has big plans to prepare a detailed map of Kerala (a province in India situated at the south end of the country), for which Google has planned to hold a Kerala Mapping Party on February 05, 2010.

It will help Google earth to present a clear and detailed view of both natural and political geography, but the plan got a big hurdle from police and security officials.

Security official have genuine concerns over the exposure of some sites which are of strategic importance and could pose a threat to the country’s security.

The main sites which security officials have pointed are Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Southern Naval Command, Cochin Ship Yard, and Southern Air Command.

There are also some sensitive locations like Guruvayur and Sabarimala temple spread across the state

Now let’s see what will happen in future. Good Luck Google

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