HiSpammers use email web beacons to determine if they have gotten a good email address. These web beacons can be defeated if you set your email client or your web mail to not display images in the emails.
The way it works is that spammers sends out whole bunch of emails. The email contains a web beacon – this is an image in the email where the source of the image is from a domain name that is owned by the spammer. When you read the email and if you have images turned on, you email client or web mail will need to make a server request to retrieve this image from the spammer’s server. This retrieval is detected and logged in the spammers web server. When spammer examines the logs, they will know that you have opened that email address and hence they know that they got a good working email address. Supposedly they can then sell these email addresses to other spammers saying that these addresses had be “validated”.
If you preview such emails and you have your preference set to ‘Load images’ will the Spammers or marketers get confirmation that the message has been read.
There is similar behavior in 8.0.x and 7.0.x ‘Show Images’ preference.
Thanks.
RM