189806 - Preference for filtering HTML or stopping mail clients from making HTTP requests.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 28327

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Matthew Cooke]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910

I can't find anyway of stopping mozilla from requesting HTTP resources that are
referenced in HTML emails.

For example when I open a piece of mail-spam containing html, a request for a
tracking pixel (an img tag) is made back to the spammers server so that they
know I have read their email and that my email address is valid.

I would like to be able to disable the mailclient from making requests for HTTP
resources so that people can't track when I open their emails.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set up an email with some html that references an image on another server.
2. Send the email to yourself.
3. The image will show. (This confirms that a request was made to a server for
that image) 
Actual Results:  
Images show up and a hit is made on the server serving the image - thus allowing
tracking.

Expected Results:  
If external resources / html is disabled then there should be no request made
for the image.

Comment 1

[Alfonso Martinez]

Please upgrade to a current version. There are several options in order to avoid
those "web-bugs".

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 28327 ***

Comment 2

[Ian Nartowicz]

There is a preference (Security&Privacy->Images) to disable image loading in
news and mail.  See bug 188476 for discussions about this.  As you will see,
even when images are enabled, the plan is for spam to not parse HTML in email
and news.