October 29, 2003
More Mac stuff ...
I'm really enjoying Panther, (OS-X 10.3) not so much for the big features, but for a great many little improvements that make my life easier. Many things that took 3 clicks now take 1 or 2. Somebody seems to have scrutinized every detail and given a lot of them some tweaking and polishing. Which is rare, usually with software the relentless drive for new features means polishing is a low priority...
I liked this article in Business Week, the author notes the same things that impressed me. And this was interesting:
...And Apple thoughtfully included a new anti-spam feature in Apple Mail that strips out a piece of code many junk mailings contain to notify the sender that the message arrived and that the address belongs to a live e-mail account....I didn't know about that problem. Is this common knowledge? Am I clueless? Anyway, I'm glad it's being stopped... Posted by John Weidner at October 29, 2003 10:50 AM | TrackBack
What's even more important is to set your email software so it doesn't automatically start to download images that are referenced in an email. Otherwise you may be sending a signal that your email is a valid one. After all, an html document doesn't contain any pictures, it just contains links to servers from which the image can be downloaded, and some of these pictures are one pixel "transparent" gifs. By varying the names of the pictures that are referenced in the html document they can effectively "tag" you so that they will know if you received their spam.
Posted by: tcobb at October 29, 2003 06:04 PM"Receipts" are used in the same way.
Posted by: Dishman at October 29, 2003 09:10 PMUmmm...not to start any OS wars or anything, but that's a user-definable preference for Outlook for Windows that I've been setting to OFF for several years now. Same for the HTML stuff.
Sounds like Apple may have set it to ON automatically in the first go-round...
[he said, as he turned and ran]
Posted by: Scott Chaffin at October 29, 2003 10:10 PMI can turn off images, though I didn't know, until now, that they could signal a valid e-mail address. Thanks!
"Receipts" I know nothing about....
Posted by: John Weidner at October 31, 2003 08:26 AM
