Never auto-open Junk

codefool · Post by **codefool** » May 2nd, 2003, 10:54 am

Most HTML formatted junk mail contains links that, when resolved, actually inform the spammer that it was opened. This makes the email address a 'premium' address which is sold to even more spammers because its now known that a human is seeing the email.

I think that mail marked as junk should *never* be automatically opened, unless I double-click or specifically request it open.

Currently, TB opens the first/last message when deleting junk.

Username · Post by **Username** » May 2nd, 2003, 12:24 pm

This is tied into the bug that Thunderbird does not respect the setting of "Loading of remote images" under Tools | Options.

I can't find a bug #, but I'm pretty sure the issue was resolved in Mozilla a few weeks ago ... still exists in Phoenix/Thunderbird.

galapogos · Post by **galapogos** » May 4th, 2003, 1:26 am

You mean we should never read the mail or mark the mail as read? How does the spammer actually know if we've read the mail, if they do not request receipt notification?

uggi · Post by **uggi** » May 4th, 2003, 1:35 am

If the e-mail client downloads the remote images, the spammer can easily detect which messages are read. For example, using an image tag like {img src="http://foo.bar/img.php?id=12345"} can load a php page that displays an image and also inserts your id into the "working-email-addresses" database.

galapogos · Post by **galapogos** » May 4th, 2003, 1:49 am

What if I just mark it as being read without opening the spam mail? That would work right?

Post by **tve** » May 4th, 2003, 3:05 am

galapogos wrote:What if I just mark it as being read without opening the spam mail? That would work right?

yes. if you dont open the mail, you arent requesting the remote image :)

dandersahn · Post by **dandersahn** » May 5th, 2003, 7:57 am

A huge issue here, IMHO, is that when the "Delete Mail Marked As Junk In This Folder" menu option is executed one of the junk messages is actually opened up while deleting them if the preview pane is used.

mcowger · Post by **mcowger** » May 7th, 2003, 2:04 pm

<i>This is tied into the bug that Thunderbird does not respect the setting of "Loading of remote images" under Tools | Options. </i>

I would like to underscore the importance of this bug. It really does let spammers know whats going on. While I haven't worked with the code, it dopesn't seem like that hard of a problem to solve.

ataferner · Post by **ataferner** » May 7th, 2003, 2:25 pm

I just recently requested this as a "feature" in the feature forum. IMO turning off images globally isn't a great solution. KMail handles this in a nice way. Any message containing HTML is not rendered unless the user clicks on a link in the preview pane that says "i trust this sender, render the message". A nice addition to this feature would be if certain senders could be permanently added to a whitelist of HTML senders. To add to this concept it would certainly be nice if Thunderbird had a nice whitelist "sender" manager similar to the way the Qurb plugin for Outlook works (http://www.qurb.com).

Cochise · Post by **Cochise** » May 8th, 2003, 9:17 am

dandersahn wrote:A huge issue here, IMHO, is that when the "Delete Mail Marked As Junk In This Folder" menu option is executed one of the junk messages is actually opened up while deleting them if the preview pane is used.

This is one of the reasons I stopped using the preview pane back when I was using Outlook. But yes, it would be nice to have another solution besides not using preview pane.

XandreX · Post by **XandreX** » May 29th, 2003, 12:39 pm

codefool wrote:Most HTML formatted junk mail contains links that, when resolved, actually inform the spammer that it was opened.

You have the View | Message body as | Simple HTML which enables you to only view simple HTML (no frames, no images). available since MozMail 1.3 (at least).

Never auto-open Junk

Never auto-open Junk

Important

heh

Re: Never auto-open Junk