Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Depends on how John does the digest form, and what filtering gets applied.
For anyone who is interested, the web bug looks like this:

IMG height=1
src="http://www.hsus.org/assets/transparent.gif?log-event=sp2f-email-open&am
p;nid=31626134"

What this says in English is to get transparent.gif from the Humane Society
web site, and let them know that ID 31626134 was read. Depending on the use,
they may or may not be bad - this one is pretty benign, though the site
developer for HSUS probably shouldn't have done this. What's much worse is
when spammers do the same thing to phone home and let people know their spam
was read.

I'm not sure if the anti-virus vendors try to do much with these, so Norton
may not find it by design - it would be hard to distinguish this from say my
mail from the airlines.

If you want to avoid these using Outlook, have mail you don't trust put into
the Junk Mail folder. You can also look in Tools, Options, Security and hit
the Change Download Settings button to change how or whether you want these
to resolve. 

For example, I put this mail in my junk mail folder, it got converted to
plain text, which then exposed the web bug, and didn't resolve it. The
downside is that if I do want to actually go to a URL in a piece of junk
mail, I have to copy and paste into the browser address bar.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ridecamp-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:ridecamp-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Diane Trefethen
> Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 5:10 PM
> To: sherman
> Cc: Ridecamp
> Subject: Re: [RC] RC Common Myths about Horse Slaughter/web bug
>
> Hi Kathy,
>
> > If I receive the digest and read the archives, does a 
> message get sent 
> > to the mother ship?
> I doubt it.  I'm no website expert but my guess would be that 
> the digest form doesn't contain the bug.  What contains the 
> bug is the actual email. 
> When THAT gets forwarded, like to those of us who get the 
> emails in their entirety, the web bug comes along too.
>
> > What alerted you to the web bug? 
> My domain, wakerobinranch.com, scans every email with Spam 
> Strainer which in turn adds to the header of each email the 
> results of the scan.  Plus, because I like to know these 
> things BEFORE I open (or just preview too
> long) an email, I asked my domain to insert a special set of 
> characters in front of the "Subject:" so I can tell by just 
> looking at it that the email contains a web bug.
>
> > I have Norton
> > Internet security and my computer gets scanned regularly, would it 
> > catch bugs like this?
> Again, I don't know but I don't think so.  If you'd like, we 
> can perform a little experiment.  I can forward the 
> questionable email to you and you can see if Norton complains 
> about it.  Just be sure to DELETE IT WITHOUT LOOKING AT IT.  
> Then you can post the results to Ridecamp {big, Wicked Witch 
> of West grin}.
>
> Diane
>
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Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net.
Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp
Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp

Ride Long and Ride Safe!!

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