You wouldn’t think that the simple act of reading an
email message would have privacy implications, but you’d be surprised.
Two scenarios can compromise your privacy: read receipts and web bugs.
Blocking Read Receipts
A read receipt
is an email notification that tells the sender that you’ve opened the
message sent to you. If the sender requests a read receipt and you
either select the message so that the message text appears in the
preview pane, or double-click the message to open it, Windows Live Mail
displays the dialog box shown in Figure 1. Click Yes to send the receipt, or click No to skip it.
Many
people like asking for read receipts because they offer proof of
delivery. It has been my experience, however, that getting a read
receipt back starts a kind of internal clock that the sender uses to
measure how long it takes you to respond after reading the message.
Because of this annoyance, and because I feel it’s nobody’s business to
know when I read a message, I always click No when asked to send a read
receipt. (Spammers, too, sometimes request read receipts as a way of
validating email addresses.) In fact, you can go one better and tell
Windows Live Mail never to send a read receipt:
1. | Click Menus (or press Alt+M), and then click Options to display the Options dialog box.
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2. | Display the Receipts tab.
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3. | In the Returning Read Receipts group, activate the Never Send a Read Receipt option.
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4. | Click OK.
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Squashing Web Bugs
A web bug
is an image that resides on a remote server and is included in an
HTML-formatted email message by referencing a URL on the remote server.
When you open the message, Windows Live Mail uses the URL to download
the image for display within the message. That sounds harmless enough,
but if the message is junk email, it’s likely that the URL will also
contain either your email address or a code that points to your email
address. When the remote server gets a request for this URL, it knows
not only that you’ve opened the message, but also that your email
address is legitimate.
You have three ways to combat web bugs:
Don’t open a message that you suspect to be spam, and don’t preview the message in the Windows Live Mail preview pane— In fact, before you can delete the message, you have to turn off the preview pane temporarily.
Read your messages in plain text—
In Windows Live Mail, click Menus (or press Alt+M), and then click
Options to display the Options dialog box. Choose the Read tab, and
then activate the Read All Messages in Plain Text check box. This
prevents Windows Live Mail from downloading any web bugs because it
displays all messages in plain text, which means that it also thwarts
other message formatting, as well.
Tip
If
you get a legitimate HTML message, you can tell Windows Live Mail to
display the formatting. Select the message, press Alt to display the
menu bar, and then select View Message in HTML (or press Alt+Shift+H).
Block images from displaying—
In Windows Live Mail, click Menus (or press Alt+M), and then click
Safety Options to display the Safety Options dialog box. Display the
Security tab, and then activate the Block Images and Other External
Content in HTML E-mail check box. This prevents Windows Live Mail from
downloading web bugs and any other items that would otherwise come from
some remote server.
