How to stop junk mail with offensive images?

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If there is no words, but only pictures you do not want to see, in the body of such message, anti-spam dictionary/software is powerless. Or isn't? I need to stop this junk from getting into my mail-box, please help
Thanks in advance
 
YURI789 said:
If there is no words, but only pictures you do not want to see, in the
Click to expand...
body of such message, anti-spam dictionary/software is powerless. Or isn't?
I need to stop this junk from getting into my mail-box, please help!
Thanks in advance
Click to expand...

If you can answer this you will be the next cybermultimillionaire.
 
"YURI789" said in
If there is no words, but only pictures you do not want to see, in
the body of such message, anti-spam dictionary/software is powerless.
Or isn't? I need to stop this junk from getting into my mail-box,
please help! Thanks in advance
Click to expand...

It is highly unlikely that a spammer will embed the graphic rather than
simply add a link for it (using an <IMG> HTML tag). Adding the graphic to
every spam they spew would make the message larger which would take more
time to send, especially when you multiply the large number of copies they
will send. Instead they'll just add a link to it so your e-mail client (via
IE) will render that graphic within the body of the message. A text link to
a graphic file is much smaller than the graphic. They would rather have you
waste your bandwidth and time to download the graphic file than for them to
do it when sending their crap.

SpamPal is free. It is anti-spam software and proven very good. It has an
HTML-Modify plug-in (also free) that has an option set by default that will
nullify any links to external images that must be retrieved from a server
(since this is how web bugs work). It will leave alone any embedded graphic
image. There may be other HTML image filtering products but free is a
pretty hard price to beat.
 
There may be ways we can help you with this, but you haven't provided any
information for us to go on, such as what e-mail program you're using (and
what version).

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please
reply only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***


In
 
Do you keep Outlook open all the time? I don't open my e-mail clients unless
I need to. That allows me to use a program that can tell me what is on my
ISP's server without downloading it. You won't actually see an HTML message,
but if the senders and/or subjects look like spam, I delete them before they
have a chance to download into computer.

I use SpamBuster (it's free from www.contactplus.com), which comes with many
filters built in and allows you to add others to the black list. You can
also make an "exceptions" list of senders you want, and assign special icons
to them. You just click to see a list of the mail on the server. The known
junk is marked with red check mark. Your "exceptions" will have any icon you
assign to them. Items that SpamBuster is not sure about show a question
mark. Occasionally, a sender SpamBuster does not recognize (like a new
associate or friend) will get a red check, so you have to take a few seconds
to review the list before deleting messages from the server forever. But
this is probably less time consuming than deleting spam messages after the
message has downloaded into your computer -- and it's a lot safer.

SpamBuster is a small program, so I keep it open and every once in a while,
click to check my e-mail accounts. I delete any junk on the server, and if
there's something that I need to see, I open Outlook or my other mail
client, and it downloads.

I've considered using a more sophisticated spam solution, but this one works
very, very well, and you can't beat the price -- it's free, if you don't
mind an innocuous band of advertising at the top of the screen.

Orrie


YURI789 said:
If there is no words, but only pictures you do not want to see, in the
Click to expand...
body of such message, anti-spam dictionary/software is powerless. Or isn't?
I need to stop this junk from getting into my mail-box, please help!
 
Unfortunately, they send lots of images, right in the body of the messages... the ones you do not want your kids to see.
 
Ahh...you're using Outlook Express then. You may get better information for
your situation if you visit a group that supports Outlook Express
specifically. This newsgroup is for support of Outlook 97/98/2000/2002/2003
from the Office suite of products. Outlook Express is actually a separate
program despite the similar name.

For help with your OE questions, try an OE newsgroup such as
microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie6_outlookexpress (for OE 6), or an
OE help website such as http://insideOE.tomsterdam.com.

If you're accessing the Microsoft newsgroups through the MS Product Support
Services "Community Newsgroups" web interface, click
http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=InternetExplorer
to get to the Internet Explorer groups, then click the plus sign next to
your version of IE to see the link to the Outlook Express group for that
version number. Good luck!

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please
reply only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***


In
 
"yuri789" said in
Unfortunately, they send lots of images, right in the body of the
messages... the ones you do not want your kids to see.
Click to expand...

Then use an anti-spam product that detects spam based on where it came from.
There are publicly available DNSBLs (DNS blacklists) and RBLS (open relay
blacklists) that can be used many anti-spam products to detect spam based on
known spam sources. SpamPal is one of those. Then you don't get the spam
to have to bother looking at anything in it, including any graphics.

Besides the "remove webbugs" option (to remove the <IMG> tags that link to
image files on some server), the HTML-Modify plug-in for SpamPal also has
the option "remove inline images too". However, ANY product that will
remove images from the content of e-mails without regard to first detecting
them as spam means you don't get those photos from your sister of her
newborn kittens. You could use the whitelist feature in SpamPal to let
those known and good senders through without modifying their e-mails.

HTML is just text with a bunch of tags in the form "<tagname>". So if the
e-mail is HTML formatted but only looks like it contains a graphic image
(i.e., no text), it really still has text because of the HTML code. So a
rule looking for the absence of "a..z" and "0..9" won't work.

Have you yet tried configuring Outlook to read all e-mail as plain text? If
Outlook doesn't have an option to set this, edit the registry:


HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\<version>\Outlook\Options\Mail

and change or create the following REG_DWORD data value:

READASPLAIN

from 0 (zero) to 1 (one). The "<version>" placeholder shown in the registry
key noted above will have a value that depends on your version of Office.
For Office XP (i.e., Outlook 2002), it is "10.0". For Outlook 2000 it is
probably "9.0" and for Outlook 2003 it probably is "11.0".

If you don't like editing the registry, you can get the AttachmentOptions
utility (a link to it can be found at www.slipstick.com) which adds another
tab panel to Outlook's options where you can enable/disable reading all
e-mails as plain text, plus give you control over what attachment filetypes
are considered hazardous and get blocked.
 
"yuri789" said in
Jocelyn,
I use Outlook 6.0
Thank you!
Click to expand...

No you're not! The latest version of Outlook is version 2003. What YOU are
using is Outlook *EXPRESS* version 6. Just because the two products share a
word in their name doesn't equate them. Outlook and Outlook Express are not
the same product. They are not siblings or code derivatives of each other.
One isn't a "lite" version of the other. Word and WordPerfect are still
wholly different products despite that they share "Word" in their product
name. Outlook Express is e-mail and newsgroup client and is a component of
Internet Explorer (and are free) and oriented to the personal or home user.
Outlook is a PIM (personal information manager) which includes e-mail and is
a component of the MS Office suite (and you pay for them) and oriented
towards business users. It was unfortunate that Microsoft renamed Internet
Mail & News to Outlook Express which causes confusion amongst users that
cannot distinguish that the products are independent of each other.
 
"*Vanguard*" said in news:[email protected]:
"yuri789" said in


No you're not! The latest version of Outlook is version 2003. What
YOU are using is Outlook *EXPRESS* version 6. Just because the two
products share a word in their name doesn't equate them. Outlook and
Outlook Express are not the same product. They are not siblings or
code derivatives of each other. One isn't a "lite" version of the
other. Word and WordPerfect are still wholly different products
despite that they share "Word" in their product name. Outlook
Express is e-mail and newsgroup client and is a component of Internet
Explorer (and are free) and oriented to the personal or home user.
Outlook is a PIM (personal information manager) which includes e-mail
and is a component of the MS Office suite (and you pay for them) and
oriented towards business users. It was unfortunate that Microsoft
renamed Internet Mail & News to Outlook Express which causes
confusion amongst users that cannot distinguish that the products are
independent of each other.
Click to expand...

My prior reply in this thread told you how to configure Outlook to read all
e-mail as plain text. However, since it now appears you are actually using
Outlook EXPRESS, just set the "Read all messages as plain text" option in
OE. It's under the Read tab panel in options.
 
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