Re: harsh image rules

[Hamie]

Chris Santerre wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Hamie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, July 19, 2004 11:31 AM
To: Kenneth Porter
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: harsh image rules
Kenneth Porter wrote:
   

--On Saturday, July 17, 2004 10:03 PM +0100 Geoff Soper 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

     

Can anyone think why somebody would legitimately send a message 
containing
'<img="http' to me? Bear in mind that any companies doing business 
with me
won't be sending mail to the address being filtered i.e. my personal
address.
       

I can't think of a reason for someone outside your 
     

organization to do so.
   

Well... Not a reason, but the marketing teams where I work 
seem awfully 
keen on doing this... They want to send fancy html mails to 
the customer 
base, but don't want it to be too big (We virus check all 
outbound email 
as well as inbound & the CPU budget gets a real hammering when 
the mail 
is 200kB in size :). Also the tool they use doesn't go very fast when 
the email size starts getting up...

Anyway... The images are all on a web server somewhere & the customers 
mail client is expected to access them from there (Dabs does the same, 
so do handango etc).

I've warned them it's not a very good idea sa spammers like doing this 
too... But I'm not expecting them to listen...

   

I believe you can do this in Exchange, though, so that one can put 
bulky images for a newsletter on the company server and 
     

email just the 
   

HTML to internal recipients. In that narrow context the feature has 
some utility. (Although I'd just put up a PDF and send a 
     

link to that.)
   


I may be misunderstanding but here goes:
Web based linked images will be caught by SURBL. (Bigevil for those still
insane enough to use it)
However I -think- what this thread is about is embedded images sent with the
email? In which case I can see a rule being made for that, as no legit
sender that I know would do that. 

 

Ah... I thought it was the other way round... Because of the comment
++Can anyone think why somebody would legitimately send a message 
++containing '<img="http' to me? Bear in mind that any companies doing business 
++with me

which indicates (To me anyway) that an image is going to be loaded via 
http (ie.. not embedded, but ona  web server somewhere). Which to me is 
a GREAT way to detect who gets & opens their email, if the URL is 
encoded with a unique key... I was under the impression that this was a 
known & not uncommon spammer trick...



HOWEVER, I'm sure their is legit mailers that may send this way. As a matter
of fact, I think I just got an email from my wife who uses Apple Message
framework v552 and it does this. So it may  need to be a ruleset with metas
for certain known mailers that do this. 

Not an easy thing.
--Chris