Lane Roathe wrote at 2:38 PM (-0600) on 1/19/10: >Well, for one they are almost always used as a way to track you.
In my experience, they are almost always used as a way to... include images with the message. The tracking thing probably happens, but come on, isn't your e-mail address already bombarded with spam anyhow? My server is inundated with spam even to addresses that do not exist. Tracking or not is moot. I don't expect that it's generally a cost- effective use of resources for a spammer to implement such a sophisticated system when it costs nothing to send a message to anywone regardless. Mostly paranoia. >Also, HTML email is very dangerous for another reason - it makes it >extremely easy for crooks to fake URLs (ie, what the user sees as the >url is http://www.bofa.com but the actual url is http://iownzu.com); That's a PEBKAC issue. A decent user-agent will show the target URL on mouse-over (or, in the case of opening the URL in a web browser, it will be plain in the URL bar). I hate HTML e-mail as much as the next guy, but I think the fear of images thing is overreaction. b -- Ben Kennedy (chief magician) zygoat creative technical services http://www.zygoat.ca
