Junk Mail Privacy
As annoying as junk mail is, there's something even worse about the move to HTML spam. If you display a piece of spam that uses HTML, the images aren't embedded in the email itself, your mail client goes out to the net and loads the images from the webserver associated with the spam originator. The URL's in the spam encode info such as your email address so they know that the email got through and that a person actually loaded - this allows them to put a big check box by your name in the active database.
Panther Mail to the rescue with two important features. First of all, when we detect that an email message is spam, Mail refuses to load any external URLs to make sure that the originating site never gets any hint that the message was received.
Second of all, you can instruct Mail to always refuse to load HTML images and objects so you can decided exactly when Mail talks to external websites.
It's sad that any of this is necessary, but Mail takes important steps to help preserve your privacy on the net. [Ken Bereskin's "Panther" Weblog]
