Everybody scrape all links. Mostly for the preview function. Just s3nd a unique url with some messengers or mail and look at the serverlogs.
Thats also a reason to use even a simple login.
Yep. My email client has message tracking built in and I forgot to disable it after a re-install once. A lot of messages are "read" immediately. I've always been curious how promotional mailers handle that.
if they do scrape all the links in skype conversations, i have an idea that would keep them very busy, such as a bot that has extensive skype discussions about links
You would be neither the first nor the last with an idea how to DOS Microsoft. Being the receiving end of ideas like that is bread and butter for any of the tech megacorps.
i woudnt exactly say its a DOS, it would be an ^ample^ collection of URLs provided to any skype user that requested it. If somescript scrapes every instance of that list everytime it shows up in a conversation, there had better be a limit to the bandwidth expended