I’ve ranted here a few times that I don’t want HTML in my email. Today I did something about it. Virtually all of the HTML mail I get is spam. I was sick and tired of my mail client parsing the HTML and going to the Net and every time I clicked on one of those messages. And spammers could use those accesses to track whether I read their message.
I set my email client (CTM’s PowerMail) to flag all HTML email as spam, mark it as read, and put it somewhere that I can review it at my leisure. Newsletters and commercial email are filtered out before they hit the HTML filter.
This has eliminated about three-quarters of the spam that Razor missed. I was especially pleased to see all that Chinese-language spam was being tagged.
I know that this may not be a good long-term technique, because more and more email clients are defaulting to HTML, and it does offer some advantages over plain text. But, for now, friends don’t send friends HTML email.