[ale] Lynx, Mutt and anti-spam measures

[lee]

Well..IMHO..my suggestion to anyone using outlook is not...I use eudora when 
in windows. It's free..and in unsponsored(light) mode...free of obtrusive 
ads. One of the features I like about eudora light is the option to turn off 
html altogether,also a feature in k-mail but missing in outlook,unless I'm 
mistaken.

Lee




> Here's the question: other than possibly cookies (which I usually refuse)
> and JavaScript (which wasn't compiled into my copy of Lynx), is there a
> security risk and/or risk of spam acknowledgement if I were to have a
> text-based mail user agent (such as Mutt) open up an HTML message with a
> text-based browser (such as Lynx)?
>
> Here's the explo: I rcv'd a spam this morning. Par for the course. And it
> was encoded in HTML. Same ole' same ole'. But this msg. had something I had
> never noticed before: the URL for each embedded image had my email address
> (pulled from my domain registry, no less!) encoded within it! Obviously, if
> I had opened this up within Outlook [ Express ], I'd probably be deluged
> with spam by now. Fortunately, I use Mutt. Also perhaps fortunately, I
> currently don't have the proper def in my .muttrc to enable Mutt to
> automatically shell out to Lynx when encountering an HTML msg.
>
> So if I were to add the entry to enable Lynx within Mutt, is there any way
> that an evil spam msg. could force Lynx to request a remote resource? I'm
> assuming that Lynx ignores image tags, and remember that Lynx only provides
> links to frames if a frameset page is encountered. The only thing I could
> possibly think of is the HTML tag that indicates "page within a page", and
> I'd be willing to bet that Lynx wouldn't touch that, either. Any other
> risks?
>
> And somewhat off-topic ... what would be a good strategy to implement on my
> parents' Outlook Express setup to keep the above scenario from happening?
>
> Mucho thanxo,
>
> Fulton


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