If you care about privacy, don't use OS X mail | Hacker News Reader

If you care about privacy, don't use OS X mail

evertpot.com

24 pointstreve20 comments

Seriously? There’s a preference called “Display remote images” that is enabled by default because most users will be confused when half their emails look like crap. If you disable this, Mail won’t load any remote content until you press the button.

In proper email and webmail clients, it's off by default and there's a button to 'display images' at the top of the email when you're reading it. Thunderbird, Android's built-in email client, Gmail, etc all do this.

In proper web browsers, such as lynx, displaying remote content other than the HTML is off by default and there’s a button to display images.

Heh. True. But, there's a big difference between surfing a website anonymously and having your mail client on your modern OS sending tracking information confirming your email address and that you opened the mail out to every marketer and spammer that sends you email by default.

If Mail thinks that an email is spam, it doesn't load images by default.

That's really not good enough, though. Lots of email that is spam will get through the filters over time.

For the curious, the article is lamenting the fact that OS X's built in email client loads external images by default. This is bad behavior in an email client. Both spammers and legitimate email marketers use external images to track if you have opened an email. When you open it, marketers are tracking what you're doing (you received and opened it). But when you accidentally open a spam, the spammer is confirming that your email address is real and is receiving the spam and then selling your email address on spamming lists.

Nearly all modern email clients and most modern webmail clients have external images blocked by default for these reasons. They have a button or link at the top of an email without images loaded that says "Display images". You can also often select to always display from a particular sender. Mozilla Thunderbird, Gmail, Outlook, Android's built-in email client, etc all display this proper image handling behavior.

Oddly, Rackspace's webmail client for their hosted email service suffers from this same privacy vulnerability by default despite the fact that their competitors' webmail clients work properly. I posted a request for them to fix it: http://feedback.rackspace.com/forums/71021-product-feedback/...

Man, this scared the crap out of me as I've been using OS X Mail for years. As others have pointed out, the post is completely wrong, here's my privacy test result after I viewed the delivered message:

http://cl.ly/image/3D0O2b450Z2t

Yes - of course Load Images is disabled in settings. What else would you expect? If I press Load Image button most of those boxes of course turn red.

> "I already had a hunch that it would automatically load in external images" ??

Excuse me, but if the author was clueful enough to expose this issue, why didn't they explain the very simple setting that changes this (unfortunately) default behavior? Head in to Preferences > Viewing > and remove this behavior. It should be the default, sure, but this post makes it sound intractable.

Am I missing something? Doesn't any mail client that auto-loads images and stuff have this problem?

I think so, and OS X allows you to turn that off. Maybe the headline should be "If you care about privacy, check your mail client settings"?

Using 10.9 with "display remote images" disabled, I asked https://emailprivacytester.com/ to send me a test message. The test page indicators didn't budge when I opened the test message. Then I clicked on "load remote images" and naturally quite a few turned red. But that's why I disabled that feature in the first place.

Nearly all modern clients are set not to autoload by default as it has rather big privacy implications (Thunderbird, Outlook, Gmail, Android's default mail client, etc).

https://emailprivacytester.com/ is great. They'll send you an email with dozens of tests to determine what kind of information your mail client (MUA) is leaking to senders.

I use mutt exclusively and of course it's perfect.

When I first tested emailprivacytester.com, I also checked Mail.app on OSX ~10.7, and iOS ~5, and I was quite happy with the results.

Now, I always check settings immediately after launching any app for the first time (and on OSX always run Hands Off!, which I greatly prefer over Little Snitch), so it's possible that I fixed obviously-bad defaults before getting bitten by them.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the author is trying to say -- is Mail.app worse in Mavericks, or has he just not bothered to configure it sensibly for his (our) uncommon usage preferences?

On email tracking, here is another fun one: http://blog.nruns.com/blog/2013/11/12/A-portscan-by-email-Al...

That email privacy tester linked in the article looks really cool.

I had an idea for an email client the other day, but the potential privacy and security issues seemed like it would probably become a nightmare.

Are there any other tools out there like this?

>Are there any other tools out there like this?

http://emailipleak.com/ is pretty useful to test if your email client sends your IP along with your message to recipients.

It always bugged me that load external images is enabled by default on many Apple products still. I was not aware of just how bad it really was. Great post, thanks

If you care about privacy and you’re using the internet, I’d say email clients are the least of your worries.

Anyone know of an email client that allows a whitelist of email addresses to autoload remote content from?

Outlook 2011 for Mac has a setting, under Reading. Automatically download pictures from the Internet:

  *In all messages
  *In messages from my contacts
  *Never [I think this is the default]

Your contacts list could act as your whitelist.

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