From: Jinwoo Lee <jinwoo68@gmail.com>
To: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>,
David Bremner <david@tethera.net>,
notmuch mailing list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
Subject: Re: privacy problem: text/html parts pull in network resources
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 20:44:10 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <yq65h9vbtsyt.fsf@jinwoo-macbookair.roam.corp.google.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <871tmfin1k.fsf@alice.fifthhorseman.net>
On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 07:47 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> On Sun 2015-01-25 12:51:43 -0500, David Bremner wrote:
>> Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:
>>
>>> If i send a message with a text/html part (either it's only text/html,
>>> or all parts are rendered, or it's multipart/alternative with only a
>>> text/html subpart) and that HTML has <img
>>> src="http://example.org/test.png"/> in it, then notmuch will make a
>>> network request for that image.
>>>
>>> This is a privacy disaster, because it enables an e-mail sender to use
>>> "web bugs" to tell when a given notmuch user has opened their e-mail.
>>
>> I've just pushed Austin's shr related series to master, so this problem
>> should be fixed as of commit b74ed1c. One tradeoff that we should at
>> least remark in NEWS, if not actually fix, is that I think there is now
>> no way to view such images in notmuch. I don't know offhand what other
>> html renderers will do.
>
> thanks for this, David and Austin!
>
> Other html-rendering mail clients that are privacy-conscious will often
> provide a button or mechanism to indicate that some remote resources
> were requested by the page but weren't fetched (e.g. a button saying
> something like [Load Remote Images...]). I have no idea who actually
> clicks on those buttons (or why), though, and even if we wanted them,
> we'd only want to add a button on an image that actually had remote
> network resources to load, and i don't know how we'd get that
> information propagated back up the rendering stack to make such a
> display decision. So i'm fine with leaving it this way for now.
Well, most promotional emails contain remote images and their contents
are incomprehensible without those images. I ignore most of them but I
do read a few of those promotional emails. It would be great to have a
UI for loading remote resources.
>
> --dkg
> _______________________________________________
> notmuch mailing list
> notmuch@notmuchmail.org
> http://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2015-01-28 4:44 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2015-01-21 21:00 privacy problem: text/html parts pull in network resources Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2015-01-21 21:14 ` Austin Clements
2015-01-21 21:36 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2015-01-21 22:39 ` Austin Clements
2015-01-21 21:46 ` David Bremner
2015-01-22 7:25 ` Tomi Ollila
2015-01-25 17:51 ` David Bremner
2015-01-28 3:47 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2015-01-28 4:44 ` Jinwoo Lee [this message]
2015-01-28 23:57 ` Jinwoo Lee
2015-01-29 18:03 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2015-01-29 18:14 ` Jinwoo Lee
2015-01-30 12:12 ` David Edmondson
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