Keep porn from automatically displaying

In the event that you or your employer have not yet implemented antispam or other content-filtering software that eliminates pornographic images from e-mail, pornographic images could appear on your screen without your having to do anything but open an e-mail message.

If you use the autopreview feature in your e-mail client, these images might appear even if you don’t open the e-mail. That’s because many of these HTML-based spams contain links to external images that load automatically.

However, you can prevent this in some e-mail clients. In Microsoft Outlook 2002 with Service Pack 1 installed, you can edit the registry so that all e-mail that lacks digital signatures, as well as nonencrypted e-mail, is displayed in plain-text format both in the preview pane and in messages you open. The procedure can be found at: https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=307594

This converts embedded images into attachments, but will have no impact on digitally signed e-mail.

The downside of using this procedure is that some messages may not display correctly.

Outlook 2003 will have a “block external content” feature to prevent the automatic downloading of images without having to edit the registry.

In Microsoft Entourage X for the Mac, the procedure to turn off autoloading of images is simple: under “Mail & News Preferences,” click the “Read” tab. Uncheck the box labeled “Allow network access when displaying complex HTML” to prevent images from autoloading. This also prevents spammers from using Web bugs to track Web site visits.

Although there is a downside to turning off autoloading of images, it can be valuable if you’d like to keep your inbox free of images you’d rather not see. Also, these are only two of the clients in which autoloading of images can be turned off. I’d appreciate hearing about the procedures to follow in other clients, as well.