Weird Google email on legacy blogger account?

[MattusMaximus]

Howdy all,

I recently received the following strange email from "Google", and I don't quite know what to make of it. I'm thinking spam, but before I write it off completely I wanted to run it by you all here. Any advice?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers - MM

Quote:

Final reminder to update your legacy Blogger account
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 4:52 PM
From: "Google Blogger" <blogger-support@google.com>

Hello,

You are receiving this message because your email address is associated with an unmigrated legacy Blogger account. As we announced in April of last year, legacy accounts will no longer be accessible after May 30th, 2012 unless they are updated to the Google Account system. Any blog content associated with this account will also be unmodifiable after that date.

To transfer your blog to the Google Account system you need to visit the Legacy Migration page at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/Y0Jf1Zeb1YUjJp right now to make sure that your account and associated blogs are claimed. If you’ve forgotten the Blogger password that is associated with this email address, you can use our Account Recovery page at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/LbrFMzCCYIqVIk to request password information to be sent via email.

For more information, please see our initial announcement we posted to our blog at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/hMFn80eHEVvBpI . If you have questions, please visit our Help Forum at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/AgN4TYhLWobvUo and create a message with [Legacy Account] in the subject line.

Regards,

The Blogger Team
Google
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

[aofl]

It's legit, but apparently a big problem that hasn't been resolved.

Here's a Google discussion of a lot of people confused/angered/dismayed by the same email and the failure to be able to retrieve access to legacy blogs (or being notified about blogs they didn't create):

http://groups.google.com/a/googlepro...E8Q/discussion

There's an updated discussion here, but it doesn't seem to be too helpful:

http://groups.google.com/a/googlepro...S1Q/discussion

The funny thing is I have a legacy blog or two that I had written off before I got the email. Now that this whole thing has apparently become a debacle I want my old data back.

I'll just wait and see how this turns out.

A

[Blue Mountain]

As aofl noted, in this case the email is probably legit.

Digging a bit deeper, do you know how to view the headers? They're pieces of information that come along with the email but are usually hidden by your email reader (in computer terms, the "client" program), be it a program like Outlook or Thunderbird or a web based system like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo. Look in the help for your e-mail client for how to view the headers.

Here's a typical set of headers from a spam message I got, this one purporting to be from Facebook warning me they've deactivated my account. (I don't have a Facebook account!)


Return-Path: <notification@facebookmail.com>
X-Original-To: me@my-email-address.com
Delivered-To: me@my-email-address.com
Received: from ns1.rookdns.com (unknown [188.50.14.47])
by my-email-address.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E216634033E
for <me@my-email-address.com>; Thu, 3 May 2012 11:16:56 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from (192.168.1.12) by facebookmail.com (188.50.14.47) with
Microsoft SMTP Server id 8.0.685.24; Thu, 3 May 2012 23:46:56 +0530
Message-ID: <4FA2C6A8.205020@www.facebook.com>
Date: Thu, 3 May 2012 23:46:56 +0530
From: "Facebook" <update+weh26mlf5l3_@facebookmail.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
rv:1.8.1.24) Gecko/20100328 Thunderbird/2.0.0.24
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: <me@my-email-address.com>
Subject: You have deactivated your Facebook account
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="------------06070400304050405050607"


Note the From: and Received: headers, especially the last Received header in the list. (The Received headers are in reverse order, so the last one in the list was put there by the first computer to get the message. Each computer between the original sender and you add its own Received header.) For a lot of this type of mail, the server name (the part after the @) bears no resemblance to the company purporting to send the message. If that's the case, chances are very good the message is not legitimate.

The above example is actually a cut above the norm, since the server's name is "facebookmail.com", which might be legitimate (but I highly doubt it.)

[CORed]

First question: Do you have a legacy blogger account? If not, I would strongly suspect that this is a phishing email. Others have suggested checking the email headers and this is good advice.

I would also check the links in the email to make sure that they really link to a google address (the visible text of the link is not necessarily what the link actually goes to). You can do this by using you mail client's or browser's (if it's web based mail) "view source" function, or by hovering over the link and checking that the URL in the status bar is the same as that in the link text. If the link takes you some place different that what it represents in the visible text, this is a red flag that the email is a phishing attempt.

[MattusMaximus]

Originally Posted by CORed

First question: Do you have a legacy blogger account? If not, I would strongly suspect that this is a phishing email. Others have suggested checking the email headers and this is good advice.

I would also check the links in the email to make sure that they really link to a google address (the visible text of the link is not necessarily what the link actually goes to). You can do this by using you mail client's or browser's (if it's web based mail) "view source" function, or by hovering over the link and checking that the URL in the status bar is the same as that in the link text. If the link takes you some place different that what it represents in the visible text, this is a red flag that the email is a phishing attempt.

I don't really even know what a legacy blogger account is, but from what I can tell from reading online they are blogs which are older than 2006. Seeing as how I started my current blog in 2009, this wouldn't seem to apply to me. In addition, this seems to be an issue with the old Blogger software, and I use Wordpress, so I'm not too worried about this.

Thanks for all the feedback!

[Eligbak]

I got a similar mail from Google because I had at one time registered a Google groups account (combination of e-mail address and password).

I never had a blog, just used it to post to newsgroups via Google.