Fighting bloated email messages

Posted Aug 24, 2006 2:26 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40)
Parent article: Fighting image spam

The solution to this is the same as it's always been. Send and accept only email messages bodies that are plain text. Putting images, HTML pages, word documents, or any other junk in the message body is an invitation to abuse.

Note that this doesn't mean *attachments* are junk, if all parties involved want them. And things like OpenPGP signatures, that are small and aren't required for the message body to be read, don't detract from this either.

If we use MUAs that display only static, local, textual information in the message header and body, and *don't* treat the message as an executable program or network-retrieval script or image-display request, this sort of spam wouldn't exist: There'd be no point sending an attached image that purported to be the message body, because MUAs wouldn't interpret it that way.

If, on the other hand, we invite everyone to send us any old crap as a message body and attachments, and expect our MUA to unquestioningly display all the attachments it can get its hands on, this sort of spam can only flourish.

Fighting bloated email messages

Posted Aug 24, 2006 4:20 UTC (Thu) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (1 responses)

Absolutely. Even better, only read email on green-on-black serial terminals. That'll teach 'em!

Fighting bloated email messages

Posted Sep 2, 2006 18:53 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

I regularly use Mutt 1.2.5 in a PuTTY window; the annoyances it occasionally causes are *vastly* outweighed by the trouble it keeps me out of.

Fighting bloated email messages

Posted Aug 24, 2006 9:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

We probably already do this: but to make it not worth it to the spammers to send this sort of stuff, we'd need to adjust the behaviour of their OE-using normal targets.

And *that* is hard.

Fighting bloated email messages

Posted Aug 25, 2006 5:12 UTC (Fri) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link] (1 responses)

> We probably already do this

Anyone who doesn't want this spam is included in that "we", so no, "we" are not already doing this. Some of us are, some of us are not. If we stop thinking of "them" and "us" and see that all users of email who hate spam are "us", perhaps we can improve the situation.

Fighting bloated email messages

Posted Aug 25, 2006 16:00 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I was actually considering 'them' to be 'email newbies who use Outlook Express or similar program and are barely aware that alternatives exist'.

I don't think many such people are going to be LWN subscribers :)

Fighting bloated email messages

Posted Aug 25, 2006 18:08 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

The approach of pine is different:

Allow HTML, but only a very limited subset of it. No images. No implicit
following of external links. It is possible to follow links in a message
to a browser (a highly useful operation) and to see basic HTML formatting.