General Q: mail clients, spam & javascript

[Jonny]

Hi all, and the best wishes for a merry Christmas to you!

Someone I know claimed that spammers send html mails so that when you
download the images that are included, their server stats can verify
that the mail address is valid.

I told him that it's not so at all, but that the mail client simple
fetches the images from the http server, not from any mail server, and
that the mail address cannot be seen at all. In best cases, the spammers
might see the IP address which is pretty useless to them.

He then adjusted ("clarified") his opinion somewhat, and said that the
spammers are using some javascript to fetch the images from the server,
and that the javascript creates some records about the mail address at
the spammer's server.

I don't know much about this, and the guy is some IT technician. But
this sounds very odd to me. In fact, I didn't know that mail clients are
supporting javascript at all, and if they do, I suppose it's just the
basics.

I also checked the source of 10-12 html spam mails just now and none of
them had any javascript at all.

Maybe I'm entirely wrong, which isn't the first time. But it sounds to
me that this person is either making this up himself, or that he's the
victim of a prank.

Can someone here shed some light on this? Or suggest somewhere where I
can find info?

Cheers,
Jonny

 

[Mickey Stevens]

It sounds like you've received a well-intentioned warning. What's likely is
that a junk mail message may link to an image with a unique URL (on an HTTP
server) that the sender has associated with your e-mail address. Then, if
the image is downloaded, the sender may assume that the e-mail address to
whom he/she sen the e-mail is valid because no one else would know the URL
of the image that was downloaded.

Fortunately, Entourage 2004 does not automatically download images from the
web in received e-mail; you have to click a link to confirm that you want to
download the images. This feature is intended to protect users from
receiving more junk mail.