[ale] Spam and HTML email

[Fulton Green]

For that matter, you wouldn't even need the email value in the URL; a
spammer-side DB could associate the UNIQUE_ID value with a particular
email addy.

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 02:22:58PM -0500, Jason Day wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 10:51:48AM -0500, Geoffrey wrote:
> > You can certainly validate an email address by embedding a link to a 
> > unique image in a message if the mail tool displays images.  Simply 
> > create a 1x1 pixel white image and name it to be unique, as:
> > 
> > esotericAT3times25.net.png
> > 
> > And then send it to me.  If my browers opens the image, there'll be a 
> > record of such in the web server that's serving the image.
> 
> Oh, it's much worse than that.  You could put something like this in an
> email:
> 
> <img
> src="http://3times25.net/cgi-bin/webbug?email=esoteric%403times25.net&UNIQUE_ID=blahblah&timestamp=2004.01.05.13.20.00"
> width="1" height="1">
> 
> See the webbug faq here:
> http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Marketing/web_bug.html