Re: HTML in emails

On Sun, 4 Jul 2010 23:12:22 -0400, Paul M Foster wrote: > On Sun, Jul 04, 2010 at 11:44:29PM +0100, Ashley Sheridan wrote: > ><snip> > >> It is nice to be able to format emails nicely, but you have to realise >> when to restrain yourself. I've been getting loads of emails from Adobe >> lately that haven't been formatted well at all, and appear awfully in my >> email client (Evolution, which I consider to be a very good client) until >> I download all the images they've used as backgrounds. It's situations >> like this that give HTML emails an awful name. > > Isn't this a popular exploit these days? I don't really watch these > things since I use Linux and view mail as straight text. But isn't there > some current exploit where images which can be downloaded as part of an > email actually contain code which can be used to sniff your system or > somesuch? If nothing else, it is useful as a tracking tool. When the request to download the images occurs, it tells the spammer mothership that the email _was_ received and *actually* read. Ergo, it's a 'live' email addy. The image URIs are usually encoded with unique-by-email-address text. Jonesy -- Marvin L Jones | jonz | W3DHJ | linux 38.24N 104.55W | @ config.com | Jonesy | OS/2 * Killfiling google & XXXXbanter.com: jonz.net/ng.htm