290082 - Want image blocking applied to embedded images

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 322533

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Kevin Roth]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Thunderbird Version 1.0.2 (20050317)

I frequently receive SPAM emails containing inline images.  The images ought to
be blocked as the message was not received from someone in my Personal Address Book.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open attached .eml file and send to yourself.
2. Retrieve message using Thunderbird
3.

Actual Results:  
Images in message are displayed.

Expected Results:  
Block inline images when "from" address not in Personal Address Book.

Comment 1

[Kevin Roth]

Attachment: SPAM Email Containing Inline Image

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Blocking is designed to prevent potentially traceable fetches of information 
from remote servers, not to keep you from seeing pictures you don't want to.

The workaround is to browse new mail with 
  View | Message Body As | Plain Text

Personally, when I get a mail with a subject like
  clamorous crossover arrogate schroedinger
I mark it as junk without looking at it at all.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #2)
> The workaround is to browse new mail with 
>   View | Message Body As | Plain Text

(But note the problem described at bug 279907.)

Comment 4

[Kevin Roth]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Blocking is designed to prevent potentially traceable fetches of information 
> from remote servers, not to keep you from seeing pictures you don't want to.

Call it a feature request then, if you want.  I just think that a feature called
"Block loading of remote images in mail messages" should do just that. 
Otherwise it should be called "Block potentially traceable fetches of
information from remote servers".

Perhaps another option is to add another setting, "block inline images in mail
marked as junk".

> 
> Personally, when I get a mail with a subject like
>   clamorous crossover arrogate schroedinger
> I mark it as junk without looking at it at all.

The attached file was just an example.  If the message contained porn and had a
more convincing subject, this could get me into trouble at work.

Comment 5

[Robert Lange]

I agree that this is a problem. Perhaps it is "only" a feature request, but I
consider it a pretty important one.

I too have recently received messages with inline images from users not in my
address book. In many cases these have been pornographic images, which is a HUGE
problem considering I would like to advocate the use of Thunderbird in my
business. I do not use automatic spam filtering for reasons not worth going into
here, but I do manually mark messages as spam and delete them using the "Delete
Mail Marked as Junk in Folder" menu item in the "Tools" menu.

Recently I have noticed that even if I mark a message as spam, inline images
will still be displayed. This is a problem for me b/c in the course of working
through hundreds of new messages each morning, I mark some messages as spam,
then delete them all in one batch. Every now and then, during the course of
deleting mail, a spam message gets selected and displayed in the preview bar. As
I work in an office that does not have cubicles, this could spell disaster...

Two workarounds are to disable all HTML and to disable the preview pane. I
consider both of these solutions to be like killing a rat with a thermonuclear
weapon. In other words, unacceptable.

As a technical user, I understand the technical differences between blocking
"remote" images and blocking inline images. But as an end user, I just do not
care. Evolution allows me to block the display of all images in messages w/o
blocking non-image HTML or disabling my preview pane. I do not see any reason
why Thunderbird should not as well.