Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> __/ [ Oliver Wong ] on Wednesday 23 August 2006 20:09 \__
>
>>
>> "B Gruff" <bbgruff@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> news:4l3l17F470aU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> On Wednesday 23 August 2006 18:24 Oliver Wong wrote:
>>>
>>>> (*) You can sell lists of e-mail addresses to other spammers. How do
>>>> you
>>>> ensure that an e-mail is valid? Send spam to it, and if they reply, then
>>>> you know it's valid. You're don't care if they actually buy the product
>>>> you're advertising or not, as long as you can confirm the e-mail address
>>>> works.
>>>
>>> Do you actually need to get a reply?
>>> Is it not enough to incorporate a "remote image" in an HTML document (say
>>> the image of a full-stop) and be able to tell from the web-site access
>>> that
>>> the e-mail has been received? (assuming that each e-mail carries a
>>> distinctive code in the URL, of course).
>>>
>>> I'm asking, not telling:-)
>>
>> Right, there are other sophisticated techniques like these. Some e-mail
>> clients (Outlook, for example, but surely most Linux clients) are smart
>> enough to not download the remote images without user confirmation first.
>> It's a constant back and forth war between blackhats who have to come up
>> with more techniques and the whitehats who have to come up with
>> counter-techniques.
>
> Smart? No. Outlook was probably among the last E-mail clients to be 'smart'
> enough to avoid fetching content from the Web without prior
> authorisation.
So they cant win?
> Microsoft has always been behind when it comes to comprehending, foreseeing,
> and addressing streetsmarts (think ActiveX or the state of IE
Active X has always been supressable too.
> security/privacy). Outlook Express for Mac, for example, suffers from this
> problem to this date. KMail even had a bounce option until recently. It's a
> response/challenge-type filter.
What does that mean "until recently"?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Roy
>
> --
> Roy S. Schestowitz | Windows O/S: chmod a-x internet; kill -9 internet
> http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
> roy pts/7 cg001a.halls.man Thu Aug 24 09:00 still logged in
> http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
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