67Should I click the Unsubscribe button in spam?
Reporting suspect emails to the National Cyber Security Centre won't halt the flow of spamQ
I’ve been plagued with emails
from companies offering
everything from investments
with a return of 49 per cent to tax
rebates if I wore a uniform. I tried
searching for the senders in
DuckDuckGo but nothing came back. I
tried checking IP addresses and merely
got an offer to buy the associated
domain for however many dollars. I
appreciate I can use the Unsubscribe
button but caution holds me back.
I’ve sent several of these to report@
phishing.gov.uk. Have you any
suggestions, please?
Edmund HobbyA
The only useful suggestion we
have is to continue resisting
the temptation to click the
Unsubscribe button.
While there are plenty of
organisations that send emails with
legitimate Unsubscribe buttons, from
your description of the unwanted
messages we can be confident that
they’re not from any legitimate outfit.Indeed, were you to indicate to such a
sender your desire to receive no further
messages, then it would simply act to
inform them that your email address is a
working one – exacerbating your annoyance.
While it’s fine to forward such
messages to the National Cyber Security
Centre (www.ncsc.gov.uk, see screenshot
above), which is the operation behind the[email protected] address, that
agency’s ability to prevent further
messages is limited.
You’re receiving spam messages, and
there’s just no way to stop that. You
can, and should, click the ‘Mark as
spam’ button in whatever email tool
you use, but, beyond that, we’d give
these messages no further thought.How do I activate
my old Microsoft
Office?
Q
Recently, I uninstalled Microsoft
Office 2010 from my computer
and moved to Microsoft 365
Family instead. In the old days, I would
have been able to reinstall Office
elsewhere, if desired. However, Microsoft
appears to have blocked this, presumably
in the hope of selling newer versions of
Office. I tried installing Office 2010 on to
an old laptop, but, when trying to
activate, I was told that it was already
installed elsewhere and the licence’s
limit had been reached. Furthermore, the
company has literally pulled the plug on
the activation phone line. So, is this true?
Is there anything I can do?
Garth Williams
A
It is both true – and not. It’s
certainly true that Microsoft
would prefer people to buy new
editions of Office. It’s also true that the
company has disabled the original
manual-activation phone numbers that
were part of Office 2010.
One could fairly question Microsoft’s
motivations behind doing that. Most
charitably, we’d flag up that those phone
numbers are at least 12 years old, and
things sometimes do need to change.
However, the company does still allow
manual activation by telephone – if you
know the correct new number. The Office
2010 support page, at http://www.snipca.
com/41901 (see screenshot^1 ), explains
that the program might display an error
message when trying to activate by
telephone. It also links to a secondsupport page, at http://www.snipca.com/41902,
which has a list of activation numbers for
countries around the world. For the UK,
that number is 0800 018 8354^2.The ’Activate Office
2010’ page (1) has
a link to a second
support page, which
has the international
numbers for activation
by phone, including
the UK – 0800 018
8354 (2)Issue 633 • 8 – 21 June 20221
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