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Another thing, set your mail readers to never automatically download images. This prevents the senders from knowing if/when/where from/and how often you read t
by beached_whale 1y ago
Another thing, set your mail readers to never automatically download images. This prevents the senders from knowing if/when/where from/and how often you read their message. There's always a button to download the linked images but its suprising how often it isn't needed. I do wish more mail clients had allow and deny lists for this function.
- mike-cardwell 1y agoAnd use https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com to test that your email client is configured correctly
- beached_whale 1y agoERR connection refused like error. I guess gmail doesn't like them
- mike-cardwell 1y agoSorry about that. Try again now
- lovetox 1y agoAlso does not work with fastmail.com adresses
- mike-cardwell 1y agoWas a local error. Fixed now
- DavideNL 1y ago> fastmail.com adresses Curious, what was the result for fastmail.com addresses ?
- xyst 1y agoWhat’s interesting to see here is Apple’s "Protect Mail Activity" option working as advertised. Loading images through their servers and throwing off the tracking software.
- beached_whale 1y agoIt still says you loaded it though.
- kalleboo 1y agoWhat Apple does is load all images in all emails on their server, instantly when they arrive, before you open the email or not. So the sender can't know if you saw the email and track email open rates. I think Gmail does the same now too, I tested that site with my Google Workspace address, it got hard spam filtered (never even reached the spam folder) but it still saw 3 image loads from a google server.
- Bender 1y agoAnd also disable MDN's [1] in stand-alone email clients and discard them in MTA's if your user-base is cool with it. # grep MDN /etc/postfix/header_checks change WARN* to discard to drop them. /^Subject: MDN: / WARN MDN_Seen_1000 /^Subject: Read-Receipt-To: / WARN MDN_Seen_1001 /^Subject: Disposition-Notification-To: / WARN MDN_Seen_1002 /^Message-ID: \<receipt/ WARN MDN_Seen_1003 /^Subject: Read: / WARN MDN_Seen_1004 using WARN as testing example, change to DISCARD to drop them [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_receipt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_receipt
- beached_whale 1y agoooh good point, I ensure read receipts are disabled too. What a bad feature these days.
- 1718627440 1y agoWhy though? Sometimes it is useful to know whether the mail got delivered, i.e. for handing in assignments. Also the read notification is only sent on recipient wish.
- beached_whale 1y agoyou cannot depend on it and trackers/scammers/... use it as a way to see if your address is actually alive or not.
- Bender 1y agoDSN's Delivery Status Notifications are absolutely useful otherwise they never would have been created. Read-replies and out of office auto-replies that reply to non corporate primary domains are used to validate email addresses for spammers. Even DSN's can be abused this way. Older versions of Exchange would not limit out-of-office replies to the corporate domains. One can drop read-replies and even out-of-office auto-replies without dropping specific DSN's. It is up to each organization how they wish to handle these. Some financial institutions will go full BOFH Bastard Operator from Hell, like me and some will cherry pick what goes through such as limiting responses to employees. Some will let everything through to justify the purchase of their anti-spam, anti-malware third party service. I was brought into existence in the 2150th level of hell. So that is the cool thing about such rules is that one can cherry pick whichever meets the needs and requirements of their organization and this is just the beginning of what one can do. The first step in this process is to enable logging of Subjects, Attachment Names / Sizes, FCrDNS and others to syslog then start building reports to see what is leaking out of ones organization and what nonsense is flooding ones organization. Some DLP's Data Loss Prevention appliances can do some of this too but they can be pricey and may leak data to yet another third party. As a proper BOFH I keep logs in-house. Logging to a third party can get extra painful with newer privacy laws in some countries. I always front-end exchange servers with multiple Postfix servers with large queues so that work can be done without losing things, extra logging can be enabled and extra anti-spam capabilities can be enabled or added.