When deleting spam, is there any value in going off-line (disconnecting) first ?

[Jerry]

Tough to find a perfect forum for this, but universal enough to have value in the posting, here.

Most of the spam we receive have ?calls? which go back through the ?pipe? to bring up the graphic or photo that is coded into the spam. Sending out the zillions of spam messages with the extra graphics weight would be more troublesome to these creeps.
If one has a DSL or Cable connection, and if one touches the spam mail in Outlook, up comes the graphic.

I don?t care, in itself, if the graphic loads or not, as I can 100% ignore the garbage they send down the pipe.

My curiosity is if there is a logging, somewhere, which informs the spammers that my email address is ?active? or receiving these spam messages.

It is a bother to pull the plug on the DSL line prior to deleting the spam. However there is something to be said for doing so if it will not inform the spammers of the receipt of their spam.

My present impression is that they send out so many spam particles that they don?t really care or don?t even wish to bother to sort out which are dead or not, but just keep pumping them out.

Is there any point in going to the trouble disconnecting DSL prior to deleting the spam I get into Outlook ?

 

[Kaiynne]

as noted above wrong forum.... but i would suggest using another email client. Outlook and its little brother are to put it bluntly, crap.
even if you are using windows there are options for you. staroffice, openoffice and others. You may be able to turn off that little pane in the bottom where the new email is shown. To answer your question of whether or not they monitor your emails to see if you open them. they would need to give every email address a unique identifier so that when your email address number sent a request for a graphic it would show that the email adress it was sent to was still live. So far as i know account lists that are active and can be shown to be so are much more sought after. So if there is a financial incentive for a spammer to track your email to make sure it is live, then most likely they will do so.

 

[amnesiac]

Outlook is NOT crap. It's just bloated and inefficient. It's a hell of a lot better than OE, and is way more robust than pretty much everything out there.

To fight spam with Outlook, I suggest Cloudmark Spamnet here: http://www.cloudmark.com

30 day free trial, $3.99 a month afterwards, and is hands-down bar-none the BEST SPAM FILTER i have ever used, PERIOD.

 

[shoplifter]

Yes, most of the spam nowdays allow spammers to know if you're receiving and reading their crap.

A recent study showed that up to 83% of spam e-mail contains these web bug tracking codes, and as soon as these e-mail were read, more spam started flowing. Benign can ensure your privacy, by removing both known and probable web bugs. www.firetrust.com

I've never used the software on that link but I do use MailWasher Pro, which is their other anti-spam product - I highly recommend it.

 

[andrewjm]

The new office2003 does not download any images or trackers from any email you have unless it is set as a trusted site...

this is by far the best thing outlook has ever done


if you want to have pics, just add the site to be trusted, and bam, you have the pics, but when spam comes through, you dont have to worry about being tracked, it basically cuts net communication off with that single email spam

 

[andrewjm]

btw, office 2003 is still in beta stages, so expect it soon

it looks um....... more blue... heh

 

[Nothinman]

The new office2003 does not download any images or trackers from any email you have unless it is set as a trusted site...

Something Mozilla and Evolution have been doing since thier first releases, go figure.