Outlook and Remote Images
A trick used by email marketers (spammers and legitimates) is to reference an image on a remote server for inclusion in the email. The href to the image can be customised per email to include a unique identifier and as such can be used to track who has viewed the email and thus confirming that their email address is correct.
Many email clients now prevent this automatic download of server resources, however Microsoft Outlook (2003) give me the message on the right here when I reply to such a message, complete with a handy “Don’t ask me again” tick box.
Well, someone at Microsoft deserves a kick in the pants - they’ve obviously spent time writing this message and implementing the tickbox and have left the responsibility of how to actually safely reply to such emails up to the user - if I want to reply and I don’t want to download this remote content then I’ve got to make a note of the email address and enter it manually when composing a new email. Why didn’t they just employ the same piece of code they used when viewing the email in the first place? Many reasons leap to mind but they’re all derogatory.
Get it right Microsoft! Grrr…
Though it may appear this way, I suspect that the reason remote images are downloaded while you reply to a message isn’t due to Microsoft’s laziness or incompetence. The same behavior occurs in Thunderbird, and it doesn’t even give you a warning about it.
(BTW, I’m still using TB as my primary email client, so I’m not just writing to slam it.)
Interesting .. I use TB as well and I (foolishly) assumed that remote content would not be downloaded at all. I might do some testing I think!
But even so just because it might happen in TB doesn’t mean that it is OK for it to happen in any other mail client. Remote content can be used legitimately but most often is is used to confirm that an email address is indeed valid.
Cheers for the heads up though