How Reading an Email Can Compromise Your Privacy

[temi]

I think this article is fascinating and can show you to to protect your privacy when reading HTML email
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When you are reading an email message (and nobody is gazing over your shoulders), no one knows what you are doing. Right? Unfortunately, this could be wrong.
HTML Return Receipts: Web Bugs

The use of HTML in email messages allows for flexible, pretty and useful formatting. You can even include pictures inline in your message easily.
If these inline images are not attached and sent with the email message but kept at a remote web server, your email client has to connect to the server and download them in order to display the pictures.



Full article

[mrcrowley]

I don't know for sure but i think you are at most risk of those things if you are using outlook express.

I would recommend Thunderbird as it has better privacy options. If the sender requests a read reciept it first asks you if you want to allow it before sending it.

It also warns you of emails spam emails and checks the links in the emails against an online database to figure out if its an email scam.

Also by default it does not load remote images. You have to click a button to load them.

[gorand2]

The same applies for web forums - an image can detect if you are watching it!

[gorand2]

and all web pages