>>-----Original Message----- >>From: Hamie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>Sent: Monday, July 19, 2004 11:31 AM >>To: Kenneth Porter >>Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>Subject: Re: harsh image rules >> >> >>Kenneth Porter wrote: >> >>> --On Saturday, July 17, 2004 10:03 PM +0100 Geoff Soper >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >>>> Can anyone think why somebody would legitimately send a message containing >>>> '<img="http' to me? Bear in mind that any companies doing business with me >>>> won't be sending mail to the address being filtered i.e. my personal address. >>> >>> >>> I can't think of a reason for someone outside your >>organization to do so. >>> >> >>Well... Not a reason, but the marketing teams where I work >>seem awfully >>keen on doing this... They want to send fancy html mails to >>the customer >>base, but don't want it to be too big (We virus check all >>outbound email >>as well as inbound & the CPU budget gets a real hammering when >>the mail >>is 200kB in size :). Also the tool they use doesn't go very fast when the email size starts getting up... >> >>Anyway... The images are all on a web server somewhere & the customers mail client is expected to access them from there (Dabs does the same, so do handango etc). >> >>I've warned them it's not a very good idea sa spammers like doing this too... But I'm not expecting them to listen... >> >>> I believe you can do this in Exchange, though, so that one can put bulky images for a newsletter on the company server and >>email just the >>> HTML to internal recipients. In that narrow context the feature has some utility. (Although I'd just put up a PDF and send a >>link to that.) >>> > > > I may be misunderstanding but here goes: > > Web based linked images will be caught by SURBL. (Bigevil for those still insane enough to use it) > > However I -think- what this thread is about is embedded images sent with the > email? In which case I can see a rule being made for that, as no legit sender that I know would do that. > > HOWEVER, I'm sure their is legit mailers that may send this way. As a matter > of fact, I think I just got an email from my wife who uses Apple Message framework v552 and it does this. So it may need to be a ruleset with metas > for certain known mailers that do this. > > Not an easy thing.
I think the thread has gone in the wrong direction slightly. I'm not worried about embedded images as such, I'm concerned with embedded images where the image isn't part of the message, i.e. the image is sourced from the web. I think only spam and solicited commercial e-mail would do this. Any solicited commercial e-mail comes to an address other than my personal address, I make up a unique and identifiable address whenever a organisation or company asks for my address. Hence I think I can safely class anything containing '<img="http://' and addressed to my personal address as spam. I think if my personal contacts send me attached pictures or use 'stationary' then the image might be embedded in HTML but won't use 'http://' as the image is local. I was asking if anyone can see why this assumption might be unwise. Thanks, Geoff
