Customer service is eBay sore spot

Some follow-ups and tidbits fill my box today. Let's get right to it.

• I got a nice note from someone on the inside at eBay saying my column about eBay not having telephone customer support had lots of "in-accuracies." One, he or she said, was my contention that eBay's online chat was handled in an "offshore" location. Turns out, they claimed, the call center (chat center?) for the United States is located in Canada. I may be odd, but to me "offshore" includes Canada, because I meant off MY shore.

I asked the person for the customer service phone number for eBay, and my box has been eerily silent on the matter since.

I received many more e-mails about customer service issues other people are having. The only advice I have is to keep the chat clients busy and maybe a registered letter or two to CEO Meg Whitman.

• Several people urged me to also recommend the open-source browser Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. I have used Firefox, and it is pretty slick. It's not 100 percent ready to take on IE, but it should be on every PC as a backup. You can get it at www.mozilla.org.

I think it is worth a try, especially considering the free price.

• There's a new kind of spam out there coming to a mailbox near you. The spam slides through most filters because the entire message is an embedded photograph. So a scan for key words (Viagra, Nigeria, etc.) won't work. Another thing you need to worry about is a new "phishing" scheme that is trying to get your personal information. "Phishing" is the term for using realistic-looking e-mails or Web sites to obtain personal information.

Here is the rule of thumb: Never enter any information into an e-mail form. Never follow an embedded link in an e-mail to get to a site at which you do business. If your bank wants information from you, go to the Web site yourself by typing in the address manually. Better yet, consider why your bank would want things like your account number, your bank PIN and other information it already has. These Web sites look exactly like the real thing and can even hide the Web address. Just practice safe-computing.