[Gendispatch] Re: web bugs vs security wrappers, url/web-trackers and IETF mailing lists

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Salz, Rich <[e-mail]> said:
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>https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-richardson-no-trackers-in-archives/
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>I think this is a bad idea. I think the idea of the IETF doing any kind of modification to what gets put in its archives is the start of a very slippery slope.

I misunderstood what this draft is about, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

Commercial bulk mail often contains web bugs (which they euphemistically call
web beacons), little one pixel images that they stick in the HTML in hope that
the recipient's mail program will fetch them and the sender can tell that
someone looked at the mail. They're awful, but they're also vanishingly rare in
the mail on our lists and that's not what this is about.

Inbound mail security filters such as the ones from Proofpoint often wrap URLs
in the text of a message to point at the security provider so it can sniff the
URL and see if it's malicious before redirecting to it. If someone replies to or
forwards such a message, we all get to see the wrapped version. Those are sort
of annoying but I do not believe that they're intended to spy on anyone, they're
to block malware.

If it's really really easy to make the mail archive unwrap them when displayed,
OK (keeping in mind that there are multiple providers that wrap in different
ways, and there's no promise that any provider will keep wrapping the same way
they do today), but I do not think they are an important problem and I would not
spend much time or money on this.

R's,
John