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Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure Mutt's not doing this?

I read my mail with Emacs, but according to https://emailprivacytester.com/ , when I click on a message, Emacs parses the HTML and inserts images into the buffer. This is default behavior with the `notmuch` mail reader

EDIT: Chat with dkg on the #notmuch IRC channel shows there's a patch to fix this that isn't in a release quite yet.

My point: Be careful, even if you're using a "dumb" mail client! :)

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A typical Mutt configuration relies on the entry for text/html in ~/.mailcap. It's quite common to use lynx for rendering, as in the following:

    text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

Since lynx doesn't load images, that would be safe from this kind of tracking. But another configuration using a different renderer might allow it.

Furthermore, it is also possible to prefer the plaintext version of an email if there's a choice. From my ~/.muttrc:

    alternative_order text/plain text text/html

I can't remember ever being put out by not being able to read messages that fetch images from the web. Even if I have to open a URL, I do it in Firefox, where I run RequestPolicy.

Are you sure lynx doesn't fetch any external resources? Some text-mode browsers (I forget if elinks or w3m does this) fetches external CSS by default so they can attempt to render fonts on the the 16-color terminal. :)

The "right" way of doing this (calling lynx in a network-restricted cgroup/chroot/container) sounds like a pain.

Lynx doesn't support images, CSS or script. It does support cookies and redirects (by default it prompts for both). Basically, it renders the bare HTML of the page you open, without fetching external resources. If you find it behaves differently, make sure your lynx command isn't actually symlinked to links (or another text browser with graphical/enhanced capabilities).

I'm sure. Mutt gives me direct control over how it processes MIME attachments with particular content types. I'm using this to make sure that text/html only gets parsed by a confined converter. See my link for details.

Just gonna hijack this thread to mention that if you use Gnus (the other Emacs mail client) to read your email you can use the variable "gnus-blocked-images" to block any images that match a URL.

Doing

    (setq gnus-blocked-images ".*")

will block all the images in the emails.

I tested it using "https://emailprivacytester.com" and the it picked up only the DNS prefetch link/anchor which I assume are due to my ISP and not Gnus.

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