For the curious, the article is lamenting the fact that OS X's built in email client loads external images by default. This is bad behavior in an email client.

For the curious, the article is lamenting the fact that OS X's built in email client loads external images by default. This is bad behavior in an email client. Both spammers and legitimate email marketers use external images to track if you have opened an email. When you open it, marketers are tracking what you're doing (you received and opened it). But when you accidentally open a spam, the spammer is confirming that your email address is real and is receiving the spam and then selling your email address on spamming lists. Nearly all modern email clients and most modern webmail clients have external images blocked by default for these reasons. They have a button or link at the top of an email without images loaded that says "Display images". You can also often select to always display from a particular sender. Mozilla Thunderbird, Gmail, Outlook, Android's built-in email client, etc all display this proper image handling behavior. Oddly, Rackspace's webmail client for their hosted email service suffers from this same privacy vulnerability by default despite the fact that their competitors' webmail clients work properly. I posted a request for them to fix it: http://feedback.rackspace.com/forums/71021-product-feedback/suggestions/4665972-rackspace-email-s-webmail-client-should-not-load-e http://feedback.rackspace.com/forums/71021-product-feedback/...