EMail is watching you!

Espionage by means of HTML-Emails

HTMLmails are not just looking better than ordinary ones, they also have the "advantage" of giving the sender the possibility to watch the behaviour of the recipient (means YOU) in some cases.

The trick is far easy: a link to an invisible 1x1 pixel picture which is reserved for your mail, becomes built into the HTML source and as soon as your Htmlviewer starts loading it down, the sender knows that you opened his mail. Its also possible to transmit a JavaScript that, when executed, conveys datas to the sender.

For doing this there are special Internetservices, one of them for example is www.itraceyou.com.

The only way to avoid this kind of snooping is not to load down pictures from these internetservices and to disable the JavaScript interpretation of the browser.

Therefore HTMLread gives you the option not to load down pictures from defined Internet adresses.

The only restriction is that HTMLread has to know the adresses of Internet- services which want to send these bad agents to your computer. For that, HTMLread uses a database in which are stored all the well-known of these adresses. The database is called »badurls.htmlread« and can be found in your YAM: drawer. It`s a common textfile where you can enter additional url`s with an ascii editor (ed, edidpad etc.) You just have to type the URL without http://www
example:
For http://www.itraceyou.com the entry is: itraceyou.com
From now on HTMLread won`t load pictures from these adresses anymore and the bad "agent" can`t find out that you read the mail.

IF you know some more of these URL`s I would like to please all of you to inform me as soon as possible. Then I will release an updated BadUrl-list

If you want get more infos visit http://privacy.net/

(translated by volki)

How to submit such bad urls?


  1. You can send me an EMail ( frontier.user@gmx.net) with the badurl!

  2. You use the online formular:
    Youre Name:
    Youre EMail:
    Type here the bad url and a short discreption:
    Please type youre HTMLread settings!
    Click here to submit the url: