Handling links
Three pages on the parts that are entirely under your control, which is more of this subject than people assume.
What you actually control
You cannot control whether a directory is maintained, whether a forum account has changed hands, or whether an address is still current. Those all sit with other people and worrying about them produces nothing useful.
What you control is where you keep addresses, how you behave in the window when judgement is worst, and whether you recognise a manipulation while it is happening. Those three things account for most real outcomes, and none of them require anybody else to be trustworthy.
How it actually goes wrongAlmost nobody is caught by a clever technical attack. People are caught in a hurry, at a bad moment, acting on something they did not check because checking felt like an obstacle.
The three pages
HandlingHandling linksStoring addresses, surviving an outage, spotting the tells.HandlingSaving addressesSomewhere you control, dated, and pruned rather than archived.HandlingThe outage windowThe half hour when certainty peaks and judgement is worst.HandlingRed flagsSix tells, all of them variations on manufacturing hurry.