FYI for Yahoo users

Price, Erik eprice at ptc.com
Tue Nov 12 13:07:46 EST 2002


> -----Original Message-----
> From: pll at lanminds.com [mailto:pll at lanminds.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 12:41 PM
> To: Derek Martin
> Cc: Greater NH Linux User Group
> Subject: Re: FYI for Yahoo users 
> 
> 
> 
> In a message dated: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 12:12:58 EST
> Derek Martin said:
> 
> >At some point hitherto, bscott at ntisys.com hath spake thusly:
> >>   More information on this and other privacy-invading 
> marketing tricks (and
> >> counter-measures you can employ) is available at the 
> JunkBusters web site
> >> (http://www.junkbusters.com).
> >
> >One countermeasure you can exploit is your e-mail client's ability to
> >not automatically display HTML mail.
> 
> The other one I've used before is to set my e-mail client up to use a 
> proxy server for HTML e-mail.  I then set the proxy server IP to be 
> that of 'localhost'.  This allows me to read the HTML crap, but 
> anything else in that e-mail which requires access to an
> external server gets redirected to my desktop system.

The free mail client that comes with MacOS X has a setting to do 
this, basically.  It [internally] renders the HTML, but doesn't 
fetch anything from the network.  Just big boxes the size of the 
images, with the image names inside them.  Of course, this is not 
enabled by default, so you have to explicitly set it this way.

I like this except that when I get an email from someone I -do- 
trust, there's no handy shortcut button or contextual menu to 
download the images and objects for that particular email -- you have 
to change the setting back to the default, which is global to any 
email you open, and then turn it back to "do not download images" 
when you're done.  Perhaps the next version of this software will 
come with a button to let you do this on a per-message basis.



Erik



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