karl shah-jenner wrote:
the 'beacon' is actually a web bug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug
and are generally gif's of 1x1 pixel.
if you want to remove such things you can do a search for all gifs under
1kb in size, problem is that they are effective when you view a page or, as
discussed here before, when you load an email written in HTML that has a
web bug embedded, hence the reason few computer savvy types will have
anything to do with HTML emails
oh and they affect all computer users equally irrespective of the operating
system
Telling your email client not to fetch pictures by default defeats them,
though. A very good idea in email, spammers use it to know a person
received the email.
And you *can* tell most decent browsers not to load images by default,
too; trouble is that makes 99.99% of the web worthless, so it may not be
a useful option. (In Firefox it's tools/options/content/load images
automatically).
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/dd-b
Pics: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum, http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
