Mail.app and spam - a way around tipping them off?

[rusto]

I recieved an email today that might or might not have been spam, it was sufficiently ambiguous that I really wanted to look at it but, if it was a spammer, did not want to tip them off that my email address was valid by actually looking at it.

So, without opening it, I just hit "Reply" which revealed the contents of the email to me (as it turns out, it wasn't spam). The original email remained marked as unread in my Inbox.

Is there a way to know if this technique (using "reply" without actually sending a reply as a way to view suspect email), if used on a piece of spam would prevent the spammer from noticing that it was read?

[yellow]

If the mail contains HTML graphics and they aren't shipped inline with the mail (meaning that it has to go and download them from a remote site), then replying will also load the graphics which could potentially alert the spammer. However, there's not too many spams out there that put identifiers on their HTML code so that they would see who/what/where opened their mail.

Personally, I just open the mail and quickly hit Cmd-Opt-U to convert the mail to it's raw text components. You can also disable the loading of HTML graphics in the Preferences. I don't believe a mail that is Base64 encoded downloads graphics.

[mclbruce]

Looks like you can "Save As" an unopened message before opening it in Mail.app. If you save as raw text source and then open up the resulting file in a text editor such as Hydra or BBEdit that should be completely safe. Not real convenient though, perhaps the process could be automated somehow.

I use Entourage and it's much easier there. Just disable the preview pane and use View: Source on any unopened message for complete safety.

[rusto]

Hitting reply DOES NOT load the graphics, here's an example of an email with an HTML body that I hit "Reply" to:

On Tuesday, September 2, 2003, at 06:29 PM, Apple New Music Tuesdays wrote:



<image.tiff>





Actually almost nothing loads. And again, I'm not actually SENDING the reply, just viewing it.

Doing "Save As..." for the same email and then opening it in BBEdit gives only:

From: Apple New Music Tuesdays <itunes@music-store.apple.com>
Date: Tue Sep 2, 2003 6:29:21 PM US/Eastern
To: New Music Tuesdays Customers <nmt@music-store.apple.com>
Subject: Apple New Music Tuesdays, September 2, 2003
Reply-To: itunes@music-store.apple.com


But that is somewhat useful to the extent that you see an actual email address and not just "Apple New Music Tuesdays" which is all that appears in the Sender column of Mail.app.

[popguru]

You might want to take a look at this hint (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030218133745429). It discusses a different technique of not loading images in potential spam messages.