On Thu, May 11, 2000 at 08:36:52PM +0200, Jacob Palme wrote:
At 10.11 -0600 0-05-11, Vernon Schryver wrote:
Once you restrict
HTML based email enough to be safe, why bother with anything more than
text and perhaps simple pictures?
What is wrong with that. I use HTML-based e-mail mostly to
inluce pictures in my messages.
Yup... It's real amusing to have your boss looking over your
shoulder just about the time a spammer hits your mailer with an html
message including <IMG SRC=....> tags embedding some of his porno
for you to sample (don't scoff, it has been occuring and has required some
people to do some fast talking). Another insiduous trick is to use the
refresh tag to bounce you over to his site where he may have other
pleasures for you like pop-up windows when you try to close the window.
This doesn't work as good since I don't think it's as well supported.
But it has been tried and does catch some chumps. Note that the refresh
tag is not active content and if you are reading E-Mail in a broswer,
it can be real effective and real embarassing. I don't know how
effective it is in mere html enabled readers like Outlook or Eudora.
As far as tracking down the perpetrators goes... How effective
have you been at tracking down the people responsible for spam?
A very useful way of using HTML-based e-mail would also be
to send out forms and fill them in via mail, but this does
not work so well because some mailers does not handle such
messages very good yet.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/
Mike
--
Michael H. Warfield | (770) 985-6132 | mhw(_at_)WittsEnd(_dot_)com
(The Mad Wizard) | (770) 331-2437 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!