Why email clients block sender images

This is a feature of email clients that all of you out there must have stumbled on. Emails sent with images embedded in them (not as attachments but in the body of the message) often appear as blocked from your email client (outlook, thunderbird, yahoo mail, hotmail, gmail etc). This happens for several reasons. The root of the cause is because when an image is embedded in a message, your email client is required to open an external source and retrieve some data. In an ideal world these data would be just an harmless image. Nowadays though this is not the case.

One thing that an image source in an email can be is some sort of trojan horse that will be set to execute once you try to view the so called image. If you are unprotected by an antivirus then you will most probably be in a big trouble. This is rarely the case though simply because email clients these days are thin programs (with no way of executing code on your machine) or even web applications.

The most widely used practice of images in messages is from spammers. Now, one would ask why would a spammer do it. The mechanism is simple. Here it is step by step:

1. Some friend of yours forwarded a message of the type “if you don’t forward this ……..” to you and a few other zillion people.
2. The forward chain keeps on going accumulating addresses in the form of “original message from blah blah to blah blah”.
3. This message makes it’s way back to the spammer that started this whole story, sometimes years after. Note: You don’t believe the years after part? Do you remember that email about mars being bigger than ever and all that crap? Take a peek here.
4. The spammer now has your email in his database and you start getting all those “buy viagra now from a cheap Canadian pharmacy” and all that nonsense.
5. Now, in that email there is an image with a source originating on a link like this “http://iamalamespammer.com/images/viagra.jpg?verify=klsjdfh994“.
6. When you open that email and retrieve that image you basically verified to the spammer that the email that landed on his hands is correct and checked!

See what the spammer did is pretty simple. His link as you can see has a path to an image and then a parameter “verify=klsjdfh994″. He associates that parameter with your email address and issues a different one for each email he sends out. So once the specific parameter is sent to the server of the spammer he knows that this particular email (and email address consequently) is valid and reached a target!

As you can see email clients have a very good reason for blocking images from emails. Now you, as a user, I would suggest to keep that restriction and lift it only conditionally and to senders that you know.

The “European Knowledge” experiment

I have just started a very small poll that is part of a small experiment i am conducting. If you’re interested please check it out and vote here. Please do not lookup the answer online. It will only take a minute to complete. The results of the experiment will be revealed once i close the survey, in about a week or so. I would like to thank anyone that participates in advance.

WordPress plugin competition submission: YANewsflash

As i said on the releasing article of my plugin YANewsflash, i have started the submission process of it to the WordPress plugin competition with this introductory article. As i also said before, i don’t think it stands a chance but still, it is a plugin released within the competition time limits so, i thought i’d go on with it. I just thought i’d give you the heads up so if it comes to a vote you know what to do

Creating a search page on WordPress

You all know i had a theme change about a week ago. This theme is great and i really love it. As it seems you guys love it too. Anyways, since day one i noticed there is no search field nowhere in the theme. That was a pretty strange fact i hadn’t seen in any theme i’ve seen and tried out before. I didn’t really care much in the beginning since i can search from the admin area and i really thought that you guys, my readers, wouldn’t really need the search function. I was mistaken. My friend and loyal reader Giwrgos (George) came back to me with a comment about the missing search functionality. As he is a techy guy himself, he was able to pull out a search the hard way, but, i was troubled about how any other non techish guy could do it. So i started considering my various options.

For starters i could add a search field somewhere in the theme. That was not really an option since i am not that good on designing and i could really mess up the look and feel of the site (something i’d hate to do since i really like this look). And here is what i came up with.

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Easily create paragraph sidenotes

When i talk about WordPress you all know that i prefer doing something by hand rather install a plugin to do it – provided that the task at hand is easy to do. I have already shown you how to get rid of the various sociable plugins and do it yourself easily through some php and css tweaking. Here i am about to show you how to easily add paragraph sidenotes. I first saw the usage of sidenotes on WordPress on the blog of my dear friend Mike Nichols. I have no idea if he does it by hand or has a plugin do it for him. In general, sidenotes make a large text much more easier to read and grab the concept. When going through large chunks of text with so much info on them it’s a good thing to have a phrase that summarizes what will be discussed in the next few lines. The process we will follow is pretty simple. We will tweak a little our theme’s CSS and that’s about it. Then adding a sidenote will be as easy as wrapping it with a div. Here is an example output:

Let’s get down to business. We are going to have every sidenote appear floating left of our paragraph. Here is the CSS block that will do  just that:

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