On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:58:04 -0500, Gene Kearns
wrote:

On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:11:49 -0000, penned the
following well considered thoughts to the readers of rec.boats:

On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:02:14 +0000, JoeSpareBedroom wrote:


Does that depend on how you define HTML email? For instance, I get email
from Barnes & Noble, with pictures, and various parts of the pictures
contain links to different web pages. Is that HTML mail? If so, there
are plenty of non-spam uses for it.

Some would argue Barnes & Noble is spam. Hey, I like the book store, but
I don't like their web bugs.

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Marketing/web_bug.html

Best defense against this is not to use a broken or disabled email
client, but to have a configurable firewall that blocks unwanted
intrusion. For instance, I block everything that is *doubleclick*,
*preferences.com*, and even entire Internet registries. I don't know
anybody in the APNIC registry, for example, and I got damn tired of
trying to surgically block every Chinese IT student that had nothing
better to do than port sniff and hack. Blacklists, Tarpitting and
SpamAssasin are also very useful tools......

Try Mailwasher. It's great.
--
John H