Firefox Saves the Day

I just got to see a new feature in Firefox 3 at work, and it's pretty cool.

I had an email in my GMail spam folder that looked like this:


Looks pretty legit, right? The link text appears OK. However, the actual link looks something like (part of the URL intentionally deleted):

http://smtp.cremadescalvosotelo.com/bankofamerica=JSPR53/e-online-banking...

So obviously it's at best a personal information phishing site. Well, I decided to see where that would take me, so I clicked on it. However, Firefox saved me from myself:


Clicking on the "Why was this page blocked?" button shows this:

I tried this in Internet Explorer and I'm happy (and a bit surprised) to report that it gave a similar "you really don't want to go there" message.

However, even though our browsers sometimes try to protect us from ourselves, links in emails should never be clicked on. If you get a message from your bank that wants you to log in for whatever reason, go to your browser and type in the URL that you know to be the correct one for your bank (if you don't have it bookmarked) rather than click on anything in an email.