Setting options for attachements in Mail

[jesuisme]

Dear All,

I've been trying to set the preferences in Mail so that all attachments must be explicitly opened by me. I've found and disabled HTML images, but still can't figure out how to stop images from loading and appearing automatically.

I am paranoid about attachments opening without my permission. If anyone has any ideas about how to supress this behavior in Mail, please let me know.

Thanks in Advance!

 

[SilentPanda]

Mail never opens attachments (for me anyway) unless you tell it to. I think this is how it's always been so I don't know that there's an on/off switch. I think you always have to tell it to open attachments.

 

[jesuisme]

Thanks for the response.

BTW, I forgot to mention that I'm using Mail 1.3.3 (v612)

Here's what I have done to reproduce the situation:

1. Open a new mail message
2. Click attach
3. Select an image and click ok

The image appears within the text of the message at this point -- I would rather it appear in the header beside the paper clip, but I can live with that for now...

4. Address the message to myself
5. Click send

A few minutes later, the new message shows up in my inbox and when I open it, the image appears within the text of the message, having opened without my asking.

Panda (or someone else), can you try this sequence yourself and see what happens? If the image doesn't open, please tell me what settings you are using/version of Mail so I can correct the issue.

Thanks again!

 

[janey]

doesnt that only happen if you send a non-windows friendly attachment?

I sorta like how it loads images instantly...but most of the time it doesnt until ive already opened it up some other way.

 

[jesuisme]

Nope...the same thing happens when I use windows-friendly attachments.

Is it possible to send windows-unfriendly attachments?

 

[mactastic]

Originally posted by jesuisme
Is it possible to send windows-unfriendly attachments?

Sure it is... See MyDoom. Very Windows unfriendly.

 

[SilentPanda]

So are you trying to block Mail from showing images in your e-mail or from opening attachments automatically?

(post 500!)

 

[jesuisme]

Originally posted by SilentPanda
So are you trying to block Mail from showing images in your e-mail or from opening attachments automatically?

I am trying to block mail from showing images. Mail does not open other attachements, like .doc or .zip, but it will open any sort of image file, including pdf's.

I recently switched from PC to Mac and I am worried about malicious code being run from images opening automatically. Not only that, but it would be nice to have control over what you choose to download and view. For example, when someone carelessly emails you a 20MB image (it has happened in my office before) while you are connected at 56K from the road.

 

[Rower_CPU]

Messages in the Junk folder will not load embedded images unless explicitly told to. So, you could filter everything through there...but that would be silly and it doesn't affect attached images.

I really don't see the need, from a security standpoint. Images and PDFs are not executable files, AFAIK, so there's no danger of "malicious code". The only danger with images in email that I know of is that spammers can see that images embedded in an email have been downloaded and will know that they are hitting a live account. Hence the behavior of the Junk folder.

As far as large images are concerned, email's not really the appropriate file transfer method once you get above a few megabytes.

 

[jesuisme]

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
I really don't see the need, from a security standpoint. Images and PDFs are not executable files, AFAIK, so there's no danger of "malicious code".

This is a good point. What I am worried about is a Trojan Horse type of situation, with bad code riding on the back of an image. <<paranoia starting to show>> (Have I been in "PC world" too long?) The fact that I don't even have the option of deciding whether to load the images or not is bothersome.

As far as large images are concerned, email's not really the appropriate file transfer method once you get above a few megabytes.

LOL. Yeah, but some folks just don't seem to get it

 

[tomf87]

People can track if you opened an email by inserting a hidden gif that is 1 pixel square. The only thing I can see is to switch to Entourage, but I don't like the sound of that either.

 

[wordmunger]

In your accounts dialog, you can specify a threshold for e-mail message size. So if it's over, say 10K, you must click a dialog in order to download. I don't know what this would do with junk e-mail, though--would you have to click for each one? But you could certainly set this threshold at, say 500K to avoid the 5-meg attachment problem.

I don't think you need to worry about auto-run problems with attachments on the Mac. An executable file will never run unless you provide the Admin password.