Email Scam - Fake Shared Google Docs

There is a particularly effective email scam that tricks you into sharing permanent access to your Google account -- including all or your email.  In this article, I will show you how to identify it and how to recover from it.

It starts with an email message like the one shown below.  It is a very convincing looking notification of a Google Doc being shared with you.  (Names redacted.)




If you click "Open in Docs", it will ask you to authorize access.



It looks innocent enough until you look closer, because it claims to be "Google Docs."  But anyone can be named Julius Caesar;  it doesn't make them a famous Roman emperor.  Likewise, this isn't really Google Docs.  To figure this out, click on the words "Google Docs" and you'll see that it is owned by a random gmail.com account and not google.com.


If you click "Allow," they will gain permanent access to your account, including all email and your list of contacts.  From there, they will send the same message to everyone in your address book.

So what do we do about it?

If you can spot the scam, then just close the "Google Docs would like to..." window.  You're lucky.  Lots of people are tricked by this.

If you were victimized, you need to do the following steps to kick the bad guys out of your account.  Until you do, they're still there.

First, click on your icon in the upper right corner of Gmail.



Then click on the big blue "My Account" button.

That will bring you to a page full of boxes of links.  Inside the "Sign-in & security" box, click on "Connected apps & sites".



From there, click on "Manage apps" near the middle of the page.



This will bring you to a list of apps and website that have access to your account.



Most are probably legitimate.  But if you see anything that you can't explain, just click on it to get more details.



You can see the date that you connected this app to your account under "Authorization date".  Use that as a guide.  If you just added the bad app, then it will have today's date.

If you want to remove something, click on the "REMOVE" button next to it.  If you can't find the button, you click on the item to make it visible.

It will double-check with you.  Click "OK" to continue.



When in doubt, remove something.  It is easy to reconnect apps to your account.

That is it.  Once you've kicked them out of your account, just keep an eye out for odd behavior. If someone shared a Google Doc with you, it won't ask you for access to your email.  So any Deny/Allow choices should raise suspicions.

View Schedule for Labs

Ever need to know which computer labs are available for a future class?  Follow these directions to place the schedule of several computer labs inside your calendar for easy reference.

• Login to Google Calendar.
• Click on the small "down-arrow" button next to "Other Calendars".  Then click "Browse Interesting Calendars" in the menu.

• Click on the "More" tab and then "Resources for cairodurham.org".

• For each lab or room that you want to view, click on "Subscribe".  The word "Subscribe" will change to "Unsubscribe".  (You can come back here and click "Unsubscribe" in the future if you change your mind.)

• Click on "<< Back to calendar".

• At that point, you should see any calendars that you added on the left side of your main view.

Reserve a Room / Lab with Google Calendar

If you need to use a computer lab for a lesson, be sure to reserve it ahead of time.  Just follow the directions below.

• To make a reservation, just make an appointment on the calendar and add the room to the event.  Do this by clicking on "Create" on the left.

• Then type your name as the title (where it says, "Untitled event"), enter the date, and select start and end times.

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• Then over on the right, click on "Rooms, etc." and click "Add" next to the room.  This will add it to the "Guests" list just under the list of rooms.  If the room isn't listed, then someone else has already reserved it.  (To confirm, you can uncheck "Show only available".  Then you should see the room with a red "X" next to it instead of the green square.)

• Then click the red "Save" button in the upper-left.

Keeping Google Docs

If you are graduating or moving soon, you may be interested in knowing that you can download all of your files in Google Docs.  Putting them on a flash drive or emailing them to yourself allows you to keep them after you leave the Cairo-Durham schools.

The directions haven't changed from last year, so you can follow those directions.

Taking Google Docs With You

If you're graduating, moving, or otherwise leaving Cairo-Durham CSD soon, you might be interested in taking your Google Docs files with you.  This is a lot easier than you might think.

1. Go to the Start Portal.
2. Click on Docs and login, if necessary.
3. Click on the check box for any file or files.
4. A "More" button should now appear.  Click on it.
5. The "More" button should pop-down a menu.  From that menu, select "Download..."
6. You will see a new window.  In that window, there are two tabs named "Selected items" and "All items.  Click on "All items".
7. There will be three options in small print.  They are "MS Office", "Open Office", and "PDF".  Select the format that you want to convert your files into.  If in doubt, you can do this process once for each option and then save all three copies of your files.  Most people find "MS Office" to fit their needs.
8. Click "Download".
9. Follow any additional directions that appear on the screen.

Soon you should have copies of your files downloaded.  You can place these on a flash drive, email them to someone, upload them to your personal Google Docs account, or upload them to any number of other services such as DropBox or SkyDrive.

(Note:  This is an update to the old article "Saving Google Docs" from June 13, 2011.)

Changing Themes in Email

A few people have recently said that they don't like the new look of our email system. You can set a new "theme" to change the look, if you want.

• Click on the small gear icon in the upper right corner.
• Click on Mail Settings.
• Click on "Themes"
• Select a theme that you like.
• Click on "Inbox" on the left edge to return to your email.

If you want to leave feedback with Google about their changes, you can use their feedback form.

Email Improvements

Google has notified me of an upcoming change to our email system.  This should be happening within a few weeks, at most.

To learn how your cairodurham.org email is about to change, please look at this web page.  The video at the top takes less than 2 minutes and the descriptions in the page give a lot of insight.

Forwarding All Email

Want to see all of your school email at your personal email address?  You can set it up to forward all incoming email to another address.

This may be especially useful for students who do not like to use their school email address but still need to receive email from teachers.

• Go to start.cairodurham.org.
• Click on "Email".
• Login.

• Click on the small gear icon in the upper right corner and then click on "Mail settings".

• Click on the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab.

• Click on the "Add a forwarding address" button.

• Enter the address and click the "Next" button.

• If it says that a confirmation code was sent, check the other email account for a new message.  Follow those directions.

• If necessary, switch from "Disable forwarding" to "Forward a copy of incoming mail to <your address here> and <keep Cairo-Durham Central School District Mail's copy in the inbox>"

Now send yourself an email message at your <you>@cairodurham.org address and check the other address to see if it arrived.

Email Searching

Ever have a hard time finding an email message?  Check out Gmail's search tools.

At the top of your email, you can type in a search for "SAT" and find everything that mentions SAT exams, but also anything with the words "sat in a chair."  Make Gmail find exactly what you want with these searches:

• "from:<email>" searches for any messages from the email address you listed.  So "from:jkikpole@cairodurham.org" will find messages from him, but it doesn't list messages sent to him, CC-ed to him, that just mention him.
• "to:<email>" acts like "from:<email>" in reverse.
• "subject:<word>" looks for any messages with <word> in the subject line.
• "has:attachment" will find messages with attachments.
• "is:starred" will find messages that you've placed a star on.  You can star or unstar a message by clicking on the star next to it in your inbox.
• "before:<Year/Month/Day>" is great for searching for old messages.
• "after:<Year/Month/Day>" is a way to find recent messages.

You can combine these, too.

• "after:2011/09/01 before:2011/09/30" will find messages during September, 2011.
• "has:attachment from:jkikpole@cairodurham.org" finds messages from jkikpole@cairodurham.org that contain attachments.

See the full list of search tricks, check out this list from Google.

Google also offers this printable list of shortcuts.

To become a full Gmail ninja, check out this list.

Comment-Only Access in Google Docs

You can now give someone the ability to write comments in the margines of your Google Docs without worrying about them changing the document itself.

The new "Can comment" access is like a limited version of "Can edit".  This is great for peer review of classwork or teacher meetings.

For more information, check out Google's official announcement.

Customize Email's Look

Want to make email look better?  You can customize the background picture, colors, fonts, etc. of your email account.

This does not effect the look of email that you send.  So you can make a very personal working environment without worrying about looking unprofessional to anyone you email.

Fo details, check out Google's announcement of this new feature:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/custom-background-image-themes.html

Google Search

There are a number of ways to make Google more accurate, some of which are quite easy.  Here are a few examples follow:

Search:  Tiger Woods
Means:  Find Web pages with both of the words 'Tiger' and 'Woods'.  This is the most common way to use Google.

Search:  "Tiger Woods"
Means:  Find pages with these exact words in this exact order.  Good for exact phrases, e.g. finding quotes, verifying a scam, and plagiarism checks.

Search:  Tiger Woods -forest
Means:  Find pages with both of the words 'Tiger' and 'Woods', in any order, that do not include the word 'forest'.  Good for countering the effect of words with two meanings, such as "woods" in this example.

Search:  Tiger Woods site:espn.com
Means:  Find pages with both of the words 'Tiger' and 'Woods', in any order, that are on the espn.com system.  Good for web sites without a search function.


These techniques can be mixed. For example:

Search:  "Tiger Woods" golf -forest site:espn.com
Means:  Find pages with the exact phrase "Tiger Woods", and the word golf, without the word forest, and only on the espn.com site.

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