You could be in for more spam if you’re not careful.
Spammers love to know whether or not their messages reach real live people. Why? Well, it tells them that the email address they’re using is real and that it reaches a person who apparently reads their content. Knowing that an email address is real means that spammers target more spam at it.
There are three primary ways spammers can tell whether or not you looked at their message.
Fortunately, all three are in your control.
Keeping spammers in the dark
Spammers can tell when you open their messages in three ways: loading images, clicking links, or replying. Each one proves your address is real and invites more spam. The fix is simple: don’t load images, don’t click links, and never reply to spam.
Images
Images can be included in an email in either of two ways.
- Inline, meaning the image is literally encoded within the email message.
- Remotely, where the image is included in the email through a link. For example, the email might contain a reference to “https://img.askleomedia.com/leo3.png” rather than the actual image file itself. When the email is displayed, the image is fetched from that link.
The sender can tell that a remote image has been fetched. They cannot see anything relating to inline images.
In the remote example above, because I own img.askleomedia.com, I can see when the file leo3.png has been accessed. Further, if the image reference contains additional information, I’d see that too. For example, say the reference was something like this:
https://img.askleomedia.com/leo3.png?email=you@somerandomservice.com
In that case, I could see not only that the image was referenced, but that it was likely fetched by you@somerandomservice.com. I’ve used a blatantly obvious way to identify the email address, but it can be obfuscated in many, many different ways.
Spammers use this technique. If you display images in spam, you may signal the spammer that your email address reaches a real person. Expect more spam.
This is why most email programs default to not showing images in email messages: they’re preventing spammers from getting this information.
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Links
Most spam tries to get you to click a link. We generally think of phishing examples, where the link leads to a page impersonating a legitimate service in the hopes that you won’t notice, try to sign in, and in so doing hand over your login credentials to the spammer.
But clicking any link in spam can be dangerous. At a minimum, the spammer can notice that it was clicked (by having it go to a destination they control). Much like the images discussed above, links can be encoded to include the email address at which you received the spam. The net result is that the spammer is notified that messages sent to that email address are read by a real person. Expect more spam.
This is why you frequently hear the advice to never click links in spam. (Even unsubscribe links.)
Replies
Replies seem the most obvious. If you reply to spam, you’re essentially telling the spammer, “I read your email, and by the way, here’s my email address in the From: field of this reply”.
People do this all the time. They reply to spammers telling them to stop. Or they set up some kind of auto-reply in the hopes that they’ll flood the spammer with replies. None of that is effective. All you’ve done is confirm that your email address is real and you read the email sent to it. Expect more spam.
Do this
You are in control of these actions.
- Don’t display images in an email message unless you’re certain of the message’s source.
- Don’t click links in spam or other suspicious email.
- Don’t reply to spam or other suspicious email.
This won’t stop spam, but it will avoid increasing the amount of spam you get.
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