Automatic Downloading of Images
Eudora Tip #147/28-Aug-2002

Sometimes when people create an email message they choose to add colour and formatting, and maybe underlined text which, when you click it, takes you to a web page. Moreover, they also often add in pictures.

If you’ve ever received a promotional email from Apple you will probably have seen this in action.

Now, while there are different ways of achieving this in an email, a very common method is to use the HTML coding which is used to create web pages. Eudora generally hides that coding from you, but you can see it if you click the Blah Blah Blah button on a message you’ve received. (See Eudora Tip #50/06-Sept-2000).

One of the things to watch out for in these messages is the pictures. First off, if you try to open such a message and your computer isn’t already connected to the Internet it can take a very long time for the message to open. (A couple of years ago I timed it and it took 2 whole minutes on my machine at that time.) You might think your computer’s frozen or crashed. It takes such a long time because the picture isn’t actually included in the message — Eudora will need to fetch it from the server computer it’s stored on, which is across the Internet somewhere.

The other thing to beware of is that it’s possible to code that image in such a way that identifying information about you / your computer is given to the sever computer when Eudora fetches the image. The people who are collecting that information then may use it to send you Spam messages.

For those reasons I always make sure that Eudora does not automatically get such pictures. If I decide the pictures in a message might be interesting and that I trust the source (eg if the message is from Apple rather than a spammer) then I can choose to load the pictures.

To stop Eudora automatically getting the pictures go to the Special menu and choose Settings. Under Fonts and Display uncheck the item Automatically download HTML graphics.

Next time you receive a message which contains an HTML graphic you’ll see an icon in place of each graphic. If you understand HTML you’ll be able to look at the coding and determine whether the graphic will give away information if it’s fetched from the server.

Here’s a slightly abbreviated piece of image coding from one Spam message I received recently:

img src=’http://:9020/zmailer.cgi?FN=”20-5″&RT=”miraz@firstbite.co.nz”

You can easily see that it includes my email address. If I’d opened the message and this picture had been automatically downloaded it would have confirmed that my email address had successfully received (and opened) this message and that therefore my address would be suitable for receiving further Spam (or for selling to others so they could send Spam).

If you do decide to fetch the graphics you can do so by clicking the broken image icon which is at the top of the message between the Subject line and the Tow Truck icon. Make sure you’re connected to the Internet first.