This is strictly speaking irrelevant - but this subject reminds me of too many SPAM mails I have received recently. They all come with a subject like 'Re: ...' or some claim that I requested something (a report, pictures, ...). Or the classic: 'Hi, where have you been?'
One wonders what they spammers want with this obviously brainless approach. However, many of them are sent as html, and when you open them, they will generate hits on whichever web-site they point to, and for all you know this could be related to bomb-making or child-porn.
Which mail-clients allow one to NOT interpret and show html-mail? The latest Mozilla has an option, and text-only mailers would of course not interpret html (or...?)
The trick here is to try and interpret as much of the message as possible (i.e. the text) without loading the external links (which is how these things work). For instance a spammer might include an external image reference in the body of the HTML included in your email. This image reference is of the form http://some.domain.com/images/test/[EMAIL PROTECTED] While this might not actually link to anything, and might be 1x1 pixel (so you can barely see anything's there), it allows them to log whether or not your email address "works", so they can send you more junk later on, or sell your address on.
While it might be convenient to completely turn off HTML rendering, there are some cases where it's desirable, for instance when receiving an invoice from a company who prefers HTML over plain text and doesn't include plain text in their multipart message. Also, Hotmail have recently taken the decision to not include plain text as part of their messages.
Kmail I believe has the option to render HTML, but NOT to load any external links. This should protect you against being "tracked" as such - not sure how it deals with Javascript if at all though.
Personally I use Mulberry, which gives you a vast array of display options, and which doesn't load external links by default. With HTML mails it renders them as "Formatted" which takes some of the HTML renders it, and leaves the pictures out reasonably cleanly. I'm sure there are other mail clients out there that do the same.
HTH
L
-- Louis Sabet - IT Manager http://www.mobiles.co.uk http://www.gadgets.co.uk
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