Is it safe to click links in email?
'Work Offline' - Another Spam Fighting Trick
Does Your Email End up in the Spam (Junk) Box (Folder)?
Email Editorials
'Work Offline' - Another Spam Fighting Trick
In Is it safe to click links in email? I had mentioned that pictures in your email can be a means of tracking your reading the spam - which will only encourage the spammer. Other problems with spam images include
- pornographic or other images that you don't want your kids etc. to see suddenly popping up
- slowing down your mailbox while loading (particularly a problem if you have dial-up internet)
One simple way to reduce these problems is to 'Work Offline' while reading your email.
Your mail reader will then not do anything online such as popping up web pages or load
images, JavaScript, etc. off of web pages.Unless you use webmail, you should be able to
find a switch like this one in your mail reader:
Let me illustrate with an example. Here is some of what I would have found in my daily spam without
using this switch:
To view that I went online again and reloaded the email. Originally, all I saw was
a red "broken image" icon and a bit of text. To show what is going on I right-clicked on the email,
chose "Properties", and then "Details".
Note that the image source (img src) highlighted in yellow is not an attachment to the message, but a direct link to an image on a web site beginning http://.... So by viewing this image you confirm someone read the spam. The name "zstop1.gif" looks a bit funny to me, I'd say there is a good chance this is being used to track the email address that read the email. In any case, if I had clicked on the image to visit their site, the ID number I highlight in blue shows that they are definitely tracking which email addresses click on the link.