Safely check potential spam in Entourage

Nov 28, '03 10:36:00AM

Contributed by: dombett

The problem with some spam is that spammers often embed little bits of HTML in their emails that, when the spam is opened, connect to the spammer's servers, alerting them that your email address is valid. The devious little buggers then sell your address to other spammers and the problem multiplies. Or maybe you just don't want to open a suspicious email to be assaulted by images that you (or people around you) don't want to see.

But what do you do about an email that may or may not be spam? It might have a familiar name and an innocuous subject or may even be from a potential customer and you certainly don't want to trash it out of hand.

If you use Microsoft Entourage, here's a tip. First, turn off the Preview Pane. Automatically opening email as you click on it is a bad idea anyway (it alerts the spammers, as I said above, and while there aren't any email viruses for the Mac that activate on opening yet, why take the chance?)

Second, when you want to check a suspicious email, just select the email and click on the Print icon in the toolbar. Up pops a print preview window that shows a representation of the email in a window. The preview window doesn't download anything from external servers so you see just the text. If it's all HTML gobbledygook or if its a blatant advertisement, you can click Cancel and trash the email, secure in the knowledge that the spammer doesn't know you're on to him.

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