My personal feeling is that any e-mail client that automatically invokes
remote urls of any sort, including img tags from e-mail that I'm looking at
is essentially broken. It allows someone to track who is reading their
mass (U?BE, that is unsolicited or not bulk) e-mail, and, if you send out
individual e-mails, it can even automatically feed back who is reading the
e-mail and when.
I believe that any good e-mail reader would, at least, allow you an option
for not allowing these urls to be invoked because of the security and
privacy issues.
Personally, I use an e-mail user agent with a lame, broken html renderer
(Eudora 5.1) on purpose. Yes, you can set it to use Microsoft's renderer,
but that is, IMHO, electronically suicidal. If I could only get it to work
with cyrus/sasl/openssl, but that is another story...
I'm not sure what the average person does, I expect that the traditional
desire is for maximum function without regard to privacy or security, and I
think that things are finally changing. My neighbor's office got nimda,
and finally freaked out and said, "no more outook". I think that a lot of
offices are finally doing the same thing and security is finally costing
market share.
--
We often hear of war described as if it were some kind of impersonal
affliction, such as the Black Plague or famine.The fact is that war is not
just something that happens, it is something that people make happen, and
they make it happen for reasons. As Clausewitz said, war is the continuation
of politics by other means. Exactly. War is neither a hurricane nor a flood.
It is, on the contrary, the cutting edge of ideology.
-- Jeff Cooper
Nick Simicich - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html
