Re: HTML Mail (was: RE: Sending

Mark wrote:
>  No flames, please.  You can decide to upgrade or not.  I'm just pointing

>out that HTML is becoming a lot more pervasive.  It's time to stop griping

>about it.  Hopefully the digest version can strip it out, though.

There are other reasons for disabling HTML rendering for
e-mail.  One of the best is SPAM.  If a spammer knows
that you're reading his e-mail, your e-mail id is gold!
One way for a spammer to know if you're reading his
e-mail is with a "web bug".  That's an IMG tag pointing
to some resource at the spammers domain with some unique
id.  If that resource is requested, bingo!  The spammer
knows who is reading his e-mail!  Turn off HTML rendering,
and the "web bug" is disabled.

(I was chatting with someone at a B&B last year about
computers.  He complained about receiving around 30 spams
a day.  He was curious when I said I only got a few each
day.  I asked him if he ever responded to them asking to be
removed from their mailing lists, and he said "yes".  He
was rather taken aback when I told him why he shouldn't do
silly things like that!)

There are also forms of "web bugs" that can secretly
e-mail a message back to the originator whenever an e-mail
is forwarded to someone else!  These take advantage of
JavaScript embedded in the e-mail.

Maybe I'm strange, but I'd rather be impressed with the
thoughts and ideas expressed in an e-mail message rather
than its visual appearance.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com

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