You knew that, right?

Some time ago, the NYT’s David Pogue ran a feature with a bunch of tech tips that seemed obvious to him but that he was shocked to discover a lot of people didn’t actually know. Like Control-L taking your cursor straight to your browser address bar, and the space key scrolling down a page at a time…there were lots of tips, so here are a few more highlights:

* An unexpected or badly written e-mail from eBay, Paypal, any bank, Amazon, Google Adwords, or basically any company from whom you wouldn’t expect to receive an incorrectly addressed email with poor grammar is likely to be a phishing scam. There’ll be a dodgy link in the email that tells you that you must click it and verify your details. Don’t. It’s a scam, a “phishing scam” and the sender will use it to steal your username and password. If you must visit a site, type the address in to your browser yourself, never click through from an email, regardless of how genuine it seems.

* Nobody is going to give you half of a multimillion dollar bank deposit to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire in Nigeria or Nice, not in Burundi or Bournemouth, not even from Liberia ir Liverpool, or anywhere else.

* When someone sends you some shocking e-mail alert or emotive charity appeal and suggests that you pass it on, don’t. At least not until you’ve first confirmed that it isn’t just a scam or a chain letter. Best place to check? snopes.com. Snopes is one of the Internet’s best authorities on email myths and online legends. Snopes will help you filter out all those scammy get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash giveaways, and the stories of infantile cancer victims collecting baseball cards. The child in question never did and he’s 64 now, anyway.

* Unless you and your contact are on some major league uber email system, don’t waste your time trying to send more than one or two email attachments at a time if they’re larger than 1 or 2 megabytes. They’ll just bounce back. Instead, if you want to share photos use iPhoto, Picasa, flickr or a drop box type site for other files. There are big mailers out there too, about which I’ve written in the past. You can even send 500 megabyte emails with some of them.