Hi, At 11:58 PM EDT on October 5 Mike Leone sent off: > * Rob Reid ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote this on 10 05, 02 at 22:35: > > Danger, Will Robinson! ;-) > > > > At 8:21 AM EDT on October 5 Viktor Lakics sent off: > > > I have a crazy idea, I wanted to ask you about: Has anyone ever > > > tried to work out how to autoview graphics inside mutt? > > > > You might know this already, but a common spammer tactic is to include images > > in their html mails like <img > > src="http://spam.server.com/Viktor_actually_read_this_spam.gif";> that let > > them know that you actually read their spam, *if* you read the message in a > > graphical browser. From then on you can count on that address receiving the > > GSSSP (Gross Solar System Spam Product). > > Most times, yes. But the majority of people actually don't use console based > mailers, but graphical ones. And the graphical ones usually show the HTML > directly, that is, they don't spawn a browser. Think of Outlook or Eudora.
Why does that matter? Each web bug is unique, so any request for it, from anywhere, anything, or anyone, still dooms the address the bug refers to. > > On Linux, at least, some graphical mailers - for example, Evolution - can be > configured not to get images in HTML email at all, As I'd expect... > or only if the sender is in the address book. That's pretty clever. Evolution would be tempting if it weren't so...gooey. > This is probably a more pervasive problem on Windows than Linux. Definitely, because the average Windows luser is doomed by not bothering to figure out what's going on, but I'm sure that M$ will add a similar image blocking feature if it's not already there. Of course, they'd put themselves and sufficiently high payers on the whitelist. > More annoying are the 1x1 pixel images that you can't even see, that do the > same thing. I believe the term is "web bug". I wasn't excluding them. Personally, I like the 1x1s better than the garish, bandwidth hogging, CPU killing, animated gifs. ObMutt: Would a macro that 1. autoviews/mailcap displays stuff from trusted senders* or 2. defangs (temporarily, in a display filter way, since untrusted innocents are included) stuff from everyone else necessarily require mutt to understand if statements? * possibly approximated by the aliases file, although you can't trust anyone using untrusted software, no matter how nice they are. -- Why don't sheep shrink when it rains? - Jack Handey Robert I. Reid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/ PGP Key: http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/pgp.html
![http://spam.server.com/Viktor_actually_read_this_spam.gif"](http://spam.server.com/Viktor_actually_read_this_spam.gif"){kind=link}