[X4U] Embedded images in Mail

[Nick Scalise]

On Monday, January 03, 2005, at 03:07PM, lancew <lance_wente at woolverton.com> wrote:

>In the Mail program is the option to "Display images and embedded 
>objects in HTML messages" which I have unchecked. This prevents images 
>from being shown in about 95% of my emails (they display as little blue 
>question marks), but recently I have been getting more and more emails, 
>mostly from pill spammers, that are showing images inline. The 
>following is the image tag from one of the emails:
>
>(open bracket)
>I=MG alt=3D"" hspace=3D0 
>src=3D"cid:338614c4d3c0$2180fea0$954aa0c0 at NLCMYDMY" align=3Dbas=eline 
>border=3D0
>(close bracket)
>
>It looks like they are bypassing everything in Mail by just inserting 
>an '=' in the middle of words. What I want to know is how can I prevent 
>this from happening at all, and also is this only for embedded images 
>or will this trick allow the email to tell Mail to go out to some 
>server to grab an image, thereby tracking my email?
>
>This isn't just happening in spam messages either. I received an email 
>from a legit company that had attached two pdfs to the end of their 
>email. One of them displayed inline and the other was just the normal 
>acrobat icon with a link.

The images are showing because they are not embedded in html. They are attachments.

The reason behind the preference for not showing embedded html issues is a security issue, not anything for/against text email. When spammers embed images in html, and you view that image, they know who is viewing the image.

When an image is just 'attached' to the email, no one knows who is viewing it.

Single page PDF's are the only PDF's to display inline. Apple chose to display them like they were attached images.
--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at mac.com