images in HTML emails

  • Thread starter Thread starter Carl Farrington
  • Start date Start date
C

Carl Farrington

Could somebody please tell me where the option in Outlook 2002 (XP) is to
tell it not to download images from the internet in HTML emails. 99.5% of
the emails I receive which contain image source links like this are spam,
and it'd save my bandwidth and increase the speed with which I can delete
the messages.

More importantly, Outlook is pretty much saying 'yep - this is a valid email
address - keep that spam coming'.

hope someone can help,

thanks,

Carl
 
in news:[email protected]:
Could somebody please tell me where the option in Outlook 2002 (XP)
is to tell it not to download images from the internet in HTML
emails. 99.5% of the emails I receive which contain image source
links like this are spam, and it'd save my bandwidth and increase the
speed with which I can delete the messages.

More importantly, Outlook is pretty much saying 'yep - this is a
valid email address - keep that spam coming'.

hope someone can help,

thanks,

Carl
Click to expand...

It is not a normal option within Outlook 2002. However, it can easily
be done with a registry hack. I don't remember what registry key gets
changed, but then I don't have to. Go to www.slipstick.com and it might
be described there. However, in order to manage which attachments are
hazardous and which are not (something that *I* want to decide and not
go by whatever Microsoft deems is hazardous), I got and installed
Attachment Options. It also has 2 options: Minimize Outlook to System
Tray, and Read All E-mail as Plain Text (the options may be worded
slightly different since I don't have it open to look at right now).
Makes it real handy to select which filetypes are considered Level1
attachments, if I want to leave Outlook loaded but with just a tray icon
when minimized, and if I want to read all e-mails as plain text.

However, even normal or legit e-mails are often formatted using HTML and
use bolding, underlining, fonts, indentation, etc. You might instead
want to get SpamPal and use its HTML-Modify plug-in which will strip out
links to images (which can be used as web bugs) but will retain embedded
images (since those don't need to go to a server to retrieve the image).
You can remove inline images, too.

Note that neither using the registry hack nor using SpamPal with its
HTML-Modify plug-in will speed up the download of your e-mails. The
ENTIRE e-mail will still get downloaded and then displayed as text-only
or the links to the images stripped out (but the inline images will
still get downloaded). What you do save is the time to separately
retrieve the linked images, but that only occurs when you actually VIEW
the e-mail. If you turn off the Preview pane then you can delete an
e-mail without ever downloading the linked images.

You can also configure Outlook to NOT download e-mails over some maximum
size, say, 50KB. I have mine set to 500KB (since I have broadband). If
an e-mail is larger than that, it won't get downloaded (except for its
headers so your e-mail client can list the item). You can then choose
to delete them (from the server) or to download them.
 
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