What’s really in your email?
Hopefully, you are not too troubled with email SPAM – SPAM being emails that are un-solicited where the goal of the sender is to:
- either trick you into action or
- invite you to click on a link and lead you to some action.
Note that it also likely that you receive ‘call to action’ emails from vendors with whom you have an existing business relationship (EBR.) Such emails also, typically include ‘active links’ as well as ‘hidden links’. (i.e. those pretty images that show up in your emails.)
In-active hyper-links in emails are not problems (i.e. a simple link that will not cause any action unless you click on it) if the emails are legitimate – the problems occur when you simply view an email and all sort of things ‘just happen’. Part of this is by design – your email program tries to ‘assist you‘ by displaying all of the contents of the message that you wish to view; SPAMMERs (and marketers) take advantage of this to:
- track the viewing of messages (was the message received? viewed by the target? what IP address is this person currently working from? What city/state/country might they be in? What time of day do they usually view emails? what is the response rate for this message? etc.)
- trick you (or your computer) into downloading, viewing, installing some program or message that you probably don’t want
What does this mean?
- even if you don’t reply to a message the person/company sending the message can/will know that you received it, read it along with where in the world you might currently be…
- once you view one of these messages the chances that you will receive even more of them increases…
- IMO this borders on privacy invasion – Anyone soliciting you via regular mail has little dynamic feedback if you read/see their material; any email message that automatically connects to a third part (without my permission) is not the type of message that I want on any of my systems…
How can you avoid these wonderful messages?
- set your email client software (the program that you use to view emails) to NOT automatically display external images or to NOT automatically connect to we sites when you simply view a message
- only sign up for ‘text’ email messages (most mail lists will let you select HTML or Text – use ‘Text’)
- ask your Email program vendor to provide you with an option to disable this nifty feature
- configure your Virus Software to block such emails.
- if you manage your email server consider adding some filtering that automatically disables such active-links (you may also want to review my other posts about dealing with SPAM at the server level.)
An example of an email client configuration change that reduces problems with active-link emails is a small chage to Eudora – you configure the options to NOT use the ‘Microsoft viewer’ (From the top menu select: Tools–>Options–>Viewing Mail and ‘un-check’ “Use Microsoft’s Viewer”; you should also ‘un-check’ “Allow executables in HTML” while you are setting this…) When you make this change your computer will not automatically ‘reach out’ to web sites when you view an email so you will loose the pretty view such emails present. I did not see an option to control this behaviour in Microsoft Outlook (so I avoid using Outlook.)
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