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Tag: email

  • The Bot fwd2cal Adds Events to Your Calendar Automatically. Just Forward It an Email

    The Bot fwd2cal Adds Events to Your Calendar Automatically. Just Forward It an Email

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    It’s something we all do multiple times a week: We manually add things to our calendar while copying details over from an email. What if a bot could do that work for you?

    That’s the idea behind Fwd2cal, a currently free project by Moe Adham that can parse any email with an appointment in it and automatically add it to your calendar. If you get an email with a potential calendar appointment in it—a party invitation, a meeting, a coworker casually mentioning you can join them for drinks after work today—you can forward it to the free bot. The service uses ChatGPT to parse the email and find the relevant bits of information, then turn that information into a calendar appointment, then add that calendar appointment to your Google Calendar.

    “I wrote it because I was really frustrated managing many different email addresses on different platforms into a single calendar,” Adham writes on the project’s website. “It also seemed like a task that machine learning could maybe do reliably.”

    I’ve been testing this for a couple weeks, and so far I agree: This is something machine learning can do reliably. The service couldn’t be easier to use, and the setup process isn’t too difficult. All you need to do is send an email to [email protected]. You’ll get a message back, with a link, asking you to authorize your Google Calendar. You can add more email addresses by sending another email to the service—just put “add” followed by your second email address in the subject line and you’re done.

    After connecting Fwd2cal to your Google Calendar, you can start using the service. You can forward any email mentioning an event happening—the bot will parse the email, turn it into a calendar appointment, then add it to your Google Calendar. If something goes wrong, you’ll get an email explaining that. If not, the service will quietly keep adding appointments to your calendar. You can even include instructions in the email, if you want, using the same phrasing you would use to talk to any AI chatbot. I’ve found the bot is pretty good at figuring out what you want.

    This all requires putting a lot of trust in Adham, which he acknowledges on the website. The good news is that the project is distributed with an open source license, meaning the code is available online if you want to review it. The privacy policy also makes it clear that the only information the bot collects is what’s necessary to provide the service and that no personal information is stored long term or used to train the AI model. The service runs on a combination of tools from Google Cloud, OpenAI, and SendGrid.

    Fwd2cal is free, though that might change. “If this ever gets too popular and it costs too much to run, I’ll maybe start charging for it,” Adham writes on the website. In the meantime, it’s a service that offers some great convenience.

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  • How to Spot a Business Email Compromise Scam

    How to Spot a Business Email Compromise Scam

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    So this is the first step: take control of your emotions. Yes, it can be difficult if you work in a demanding field. But it’s your best first defense, and your employer will thank you for it (or, at least, they should).

    Always Confirm Through a Second Channel

    Now that you’re skeptically questioning the legitimacy of the urgent request, check to make sure the email is coming from the person it claims to be from. The best way to do this is to ask—just be careful.

    “If you received an email like this, it’s important to pick up the phone and call the number you know to be legitimate,” says Larson, adding a caveat. “Do not rely on a phone number in the email itself—it will be owned by the threat actor.”

    This is a crucial point: any contact information in the email itself is likely compromised, and sometimes cleverly so. Use the phone number you’ve already saved in your phone for the person in question, or look up the phone number on an official website or in an official company directory. This applies even if the number in the email looks correct, because some scammers will go through the trouble of getting a phone number that’s similar to that of the person they’re impersonating, all on the hopes that you’ll call that number instead of the real one.

    “I’ve seen phone numbers off two digits from the actual phone number,” says Tokazowski.

    Call the person who supposedly emailed you—using a number you are 100 percent sure is real—and confirm the request is authentic. You could also use some other secure communication channel like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or, if they’re in the office, just ask them face to face. The point is to confirm any urgent request somewhere outside of the initial email. And even if the person is your boss or some other bigwig, do not worry about wasting their time.

    “The person that is being impersonated would so much rather have someone take the time to confirm than to lose thousands or a million dollars in a malicious transaction,” says Larson.

    Check the Email Address

    Getting in touch with the supposed sender isn’t always an option. If not, there are a few tricks you can use to spot whether an email is real or fake. The first: check the email address and make sure it’s from company domain.

    “Always check the domains that you’re receiving emails from,” says Larson. Sometimes this will be obvious; your CEO likely isn’t emailing you from a Gmail account, for example. Sometimes it will be more subtle—fraudsters have been known to purchase domains that look similar to that of the company they’re attempting to fraud, all in the hopes of appearing legitimate.

    It’s also worth checking to see if the email signature matches the address the email is coming from. “If you look in the footer, they’ll use the actual domain of the company to make it look legitimate, but that won’t match the email address,” says Larson. Just keep in mind that the difference might be subtle. “Lookalike domains are very common: someone will do a slight variation, like an ‘l’ instead of an ‘i’, to make it look legitimate.” One way to test that, if you’re suspicious, is to copy and paste the domain half of the address into a browser. If you don’t get a website, you’re probably dealing with a fake.

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  • 4 Internal Apple Emails That Helped the DOJ Build Its Case

    4 Internal Apple Emails That Helped the DOJ Build Its Case

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    Apple uses the dominance of the iPhone to illegally suppress competition in ways that harm consumers, the US Department of Justice alleged in a lawsuit filed Thursday.

    Apple has denied it acts illegally, with spokesperson Fred Sainz saying that the suit “threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.” But key parts of the suit use the words of Apple’s own executives against the company. The DOJ lawsuit quotes internal emails to argue that Apple knowingly restricts users and developers in unfair ways. Here is how four of the messages appear to show executives discussing how to maintain tight control of Apple’s ecosystem.

    “Not Fun to Watch”

    The DOJ’s complaint opens by quoting an email exchange from 2010 between Apple cofounder and then CEO Steve Jobs and an unnamed “top Apple executive.” It describes the executive emailing Jobs about a new ad for Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, in which a woman first uses an iPhone to buy and read books using Amazon’s iOS Kindle app but later reads those books on an Android phone.

    The suit portrays this ad as triggering concern inside Apple. It says the executive wrote to Jobs about it, saying that one “message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.” The suit doesn’t quote Jobs’ response at length, but says he wrote that Apple would “force” developers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform.

    The DOJ alleges that the episode demonstrates an early instance of Apple using a playbook it has turned to repeatedly when facing competition, intentionally locking users and developers into Apple’s ecosystem. The lawsuit claims that practice has made switching to Apple alternatives more expensive than it’s worth, deterring competition.

    “iPhone Families”

    The way Apple restricts the iMessage messaging service is a major feature of the DOJ’s antitrust allegations. It cites emails, including to current CEO Tim Cook, as evidence that the company knew it was harming users and making it more difficult to switch away from an iPhone.

    One 2013 message quoted, from Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, is claimed to have warned that allowing Apple Messages to work across platforms “would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”

    In March 2016, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing—apparently Phil Schiller—is said to have looped in CEO Tim Cook on a similar discussion, forwarding an email that said “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us.”

    Frustration from some users about Apple’s control of iMessage and confinement of messages from people outside Apple’s ecosystem inside green bubbles has grown since. Last November Apple signaled it was ready to make some concessions, saying it would add compatibility with the RCS messaging standard to iMessage. Apple has also long argued that iMessage’s security features are a bar to interoperability, another point of contention with the DOJ.

    “Prevent … Switching”

    The Apple Watch didn’t turn into a blockbuster like the iPhone, but the DOJ suit quotes an executive’s email to allege that the company used the device to exert leverage on its smartphone customers. In 2019, the suit alleges, Apple’s vice president of product marketing for Apple Watch wrote that the device “may help prevent iPhone customers from switching.”

    The DOJ claims that unspecified surveys have reached similar conclusions, finding that the devices linked to their iPhones deter them from switching to Android.

    “We believe this lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law, and we will vigorously defend against it,” Apple said in an emailed statement Thursday. Something it will have to defend against, though, are the words of its own executives.

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