More spam discussion

[jabr at blu.org (John Abreau)]

Bayard Coolidge USG <coolidge at n1ho.zk3.dec.com> writes:

> In fact, it's an amusing irony that I am now running exmh 2.5 (thanks
> to Paul Lussier's excellent talk in Nashua a couple of months ago).
> ........
> One of the bad things about much of the spam is that the message is
> in HTML, which exmh will readily display inline for me, BUT all too
> often, there are references to .gif or other decorations from an
> external site that I have to wait forever for. Or, worse yet, there's
> an inline URL that calls up a web page using a specific serial number
> as an argument, which in effect tells the server/spammer that I
> opened the message.

Exmh can be configured to defer rendering the html until you click on
the highlighted placeholder. When I get one of these in my inbox,
I usually treat it as spam and delete it unseen, without rendering
the html.

Also, by default a multipart/alternative with a text/plain and a text/html 
will render whichever part appears last in the message. In practice, this 
is
always the text/html, as every mail client I've seen that sends multipart/
alternative always includes the text/plain part first. However, there's a 
patch for exmh that makes it check explicitly for a text/plain part, and 
renders that by default. That should reduce the false-positives to almost
zero.

    http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/mh-users/1999-03/msg
00008.html


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
ICQ 28611923 / AIM abreauj / JABBER jabr at jabber.org / YAHOO abreauj
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
PGP-Key-Fingerprint 72 FB 39 4F 3C 3B D6 5B E0 C8 5A 6E F1 2C BE 99


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 344 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20020311/af926a64/attachment.sig>