The Fnordistan Department of Software Engineering

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client for quite some time now. Only one little feature (or rather, lack thereof), has annoyed me:

I normally have it set to block images in my e-mail from being loaded by default, since this is one way spammers harvest “live” e-mail addresses — even if you immediately delete the e-mail, as soon as you click on it you’ve connected to the remote server where the linked image is hosted, and an embedded link can tell the spammer that a live person just viewed e-mail sent to goober@iluvspam.com.

However, I also regularly receive e-mail with embedded images that I want to view — my daily MyComics subscription and some 3D graphics fora newsletters, for example. So before viewing those, I have to manually go to the Tool|Options menu, choose “Advanced Settings”, unlock loading of images, view the e-mail, and then go back and block loading of images again.

Not anymore!

Thunderbird 0.8 added a feature where you can block loading of remote images except in e-mails sent from addresses in your personal and/or collected addresses list. So now I can add the addresses of those graphics-laden lists to my collected addresses book, and viola! I automatically get to view images from senders I have designated, while everyone else is blocked!

It’s a small thing, it was probably trivial to program, but it has just made Thunderbird significantly more pleasant and convenient for me.

If you are still using Outlook or Outlook Express…. why???

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 16th, 2004 at 7:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.