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Fetching any email content is always worse than blocking it, because the typical threshold for spam is "is this inbox monitored". If that is true, then blast it with spam. And fetching anything ever proves that the inbox is monitored.

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My impression as a Mutt user (which never downloads linked content) is that spammers don’t really care about whether an inbox is “monitored” or not.

At least in Gmail, downloading content (e.g. images) is disabled by default for suspicious emails. There is no way for the sender to know if it’s monitored unless this is disabled by explicit user action.

This freaked me out the first time I used Mail. It rendered a PDF about buying bitcoin on PayPal (I don't have PayPal). Looked at the same email in Gmail and Thunderbird, it's just a PDF attachment, no message, and the sender was different. No wonder people are falling for those scams, Mail makes it easy for them.

Now if only I had a better client on my phone (never buying an iPhone again)

What made you prefer Mail to Gmail, given you don’t seem satisfied with Apple’s Mail app?

I prefer Thunderbird

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