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On why you must not even open a spam message

A spammer can embed some item that requires web access, like an image. It is very easy to embed a 1px transparent image in an email. When you open the mail, that image is accessed from his/her server.

So what? you may ask. The trick is that (s)he may create a unique picture for every email that (s)he sends. This offers a easy, clean technique to find out which email ids are being used.

So, just delete that message. Don't open it.

Wikpedia article on Web Bugs

Also, do not post your email id on the web where a harvesting bot can access it

Wikipedia article on email address harvesting

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Comments

  1. Aditya Mehta23 November 2010 at 00:21

    When you said, email address harvesting on wiki, it first seems like if you signup for wiki, then your email id will get harvested by spammers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous23 November 2010 at 07:57

    Yeah, corrected that.
    Thanks for pointing it out.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Prashant23 November 2010 at 23:30

    But with Gmail, I think that this Web bug is useless, as it does not show images by default.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous23 November 2010 at 23:45

    Well, yes. That is an option in many email clients. In fact, that is one reason why text based email clients like SquirrelMail are so much safer. No embedded HTML automatically reduces the risk.

    ReplyDelete

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