Hi all,
Theres one easy way to start cutting the amount of spam down and thats stopping using MS Outlook or MS Outlook Express.
Use something like Mozilla Thunderbird instead!
The problem with Outlook is that you cannot stop viewing mail as html whereas you can set thunderbird to view mail as Pain Text only.
Viewing mail as html can cause all sorts of problems, such as running scripts etc but the main problem, I discovered the other day.
Say, I guess at an email address:
someone@adomain.com and send an html email containing, say:
<img src="http://mywebserver/images/piccy.gif?name=someone@adomain.com>
Now if this email address is vaild and that person reads the email as html then a request will come into my server: mywebserver
If my Web server is configured that .gif.s are in in fact as php scripts (that is, they are NOT images) then the parameter name=someone@adomain.com will be passed.
I can process the name parameter and stick it in a database of valid email addresses since the only way the Web server will have got the request in the first place is if
someone@adomain.com was reading the email.
So, since you cannot get rid of html in Outlook, I would suggest getting rid!!!
gazbiggs