Re: [Shutup] [ietf-smtp] Proposed Charter for the "SMTP Headers Unhealthy To User Privacy" WG (fwd)

["Robert A. Rosenberg" <[e-mail]>]

At 02:48 +0000 on 12/04/2015, Ted Lemon wrote about Re: [ietf-smtp] 
[Shutup] Proposed Charter for the "SMTP Hea:

>Thursday, Dec 3, 2015 9:39 PM Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
>>  If the message is HTML, then putting a 1x1 web-bug image in the 
>>HTML will trigger the info UNLESS the user's MUA is set to NOT 
>>automatically retrieve images.
>
>That retrieving images is the default behavior of most MUAs, and 
>that it is even possible to do without cryptographically validating 
>the ID of the sender in _any_ MUA, is an example of what I am 
>talking about when I say that UI design is vitally important to 
>protecting users' privacy.
>
>Obviously if you have an MUA that behaves so stupidly, then your 
>privacy is forfeit.   At present, that's most MUAs.   This is 
>something that I hope MUA implementors will wise up to, and we ought 
>to be advising them to if we aren't already.

As you can see from my X-Mailer header (which BTW [since we are 
talking about leaking info] leaks the fact that I am using a Mac and 
what MacOS Version I am running) I use Eudora. One of its settings 
(which I have set) tells the MUA to NOT fetch images and to wait 
until I click on the image icon to replace the icon with the actual 
image. Thus I see the icon whenever I am sent a Web-Bug in lieu of 
the bug calling home.