Very crafty little email. Uses ICQ's web message tool and a well-written email asking you to login with your ICQ # and password. If you do you'll obviously find your account won't be working after awhile.

Dear ICQ user,

The ICQ Inc. is refreshing its databases to delete the inactive accounts. Please fill in your ICQ# and your Password and then submit this form by clicking the Send button. This is everything that you have to do to keep your account active. Don't reply to this mail. After your submission you will be forwarded to our homepage and will be able to read the latest news about ICQ Inc. Unless you confirm us that you are using your ICQ legally by filling the empty spaces, you won't be able to use your ICQ account after our refreshing is over.

With best regards ICQ Inc.

Form at the bottom asking you to login to ICQ with your UIN and password. Posts your password to UIN 50326938 using ICQ's online pager service.

Obviously as with all messages: be careful with email.

Sincerely,

-Matt

Why would anyone want your ICQ password? Doesn't reveal much, you'd have to a lot of time on your hands and be pretty sad to actually gain any satisifaction from it.

It is very easy to retrieve your password from your lost account

From ICQ's website:

* The password retrieval service is applicable to Email addresses entered as of September 1, 1999, in the Email field under an ICQ number user details.
* Once an ICQ password is retrieved, any further attempt to retrieve the password to a more recently entered Email address for that ICQ number, will fail.

Tell this guy a false password :D

EDIT: Where did the mail send from?

I remember reading about this not too long ago. There's a bit of information on it here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24377.html

I tried ICQ long time and keep trying from time to time, but for some reason I do not, and never have, liked it, so I do not use it. I do not know really why. 50% of the reason could be the large amounts of spam.


-Ace

I stopped using ICQ a long time ago too. AIM is much better ;-)

Those types of messages have been around ever since ICQ was around.

If you thought about it logically; they wouldn't refresh their databases because it would reduce their number of users quite significantly thus making their reported "market share" much lower.

I use AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger all from within Trillian (http://www.trillian.cc). It works great :)

I've been getting annoyed at the MSN network though, because recently it has been losing messages, etc. causing much confusion when in an IM session (it happens with both Trillian and MSN/Windows Messenger).

--Shaun