On 2021-05-30 at 01:53:46 UTC-0400 (Sun, 30 May 2021 07:53:46 +0200)
Patrik Fältström via mailmate <mailmate@lists.freron.com>
is rumored to have said:
As MM is already doing some guessing/decision making on what are
downloads and what are trackers,
Where do you see "guessing" happening?
The only distinctions I see MM making are very standardized and
deterministic. Images included in messages are handled depending on
their Content-Disposition headers (inline or attachment) and images
referenced in HTML which are not included in messages are not loaded
unless they pass the criteria in the Security->Image Blocking
preferences pane. I do not know of any circumstances where it makes any
more nuanced decision about the handling of non-text objects.
1x1 trackers are often detectable because in email, remote loading is
widely disabled and it can ruin layout to not know the size of a missing
image. However, people using images for tracking have also figured out
that if they are using images as images, there's no reason that they
need to have a special 1x1 tracking image. Every image in a HTML email
can carry an identifying tag in its URL and hence be used as a tracker.
If an image URL includes 5 arbitrary characters, it can be a tracker.
Obviously it CAN be a tracker with a smaller target-ID, but ~30 bits is
a scale adequate for almost all purposes. It's not really feasible for
client software like MM to make an accurate complete judgment of
whether a particular external reference is a tracker or not.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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