junk mail

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Tom Palmquist wrote:

> > No.  I seem to recall that Outlook and possibly Express had auto-open
> > facilities at least at some point in their version history, whereby
> > absolutely no human action other than opening the -message- would open the
> > attachments.  Unsure if it's non-defaulted, removed, or still an issue to
> > unconfigure, but it was an issue at some point.
> > 
> > m->

In the hopes of clarifying, I believe the following is the issue:

If the format of the email message is HTML, that can include <IMG> tags, 
which could fetch images (bitmaps) from specified HTML servers. 

If you view your index of available emails in a graphical email program, 
it may be configured to present a partial or thumbnail view of the message 
currently selected in the index. This causes the email program to fetch 
the indicated images.

If the sender (spammer) is connected to the server that contains the 
images, they may be able to verify that you viewed the email, and 
therefore that your email address is valid. There can be legitimate 
reasons for this. There are obviously illegitimate reasons for this.

It has little if anything to do with Microsoft.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
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