Anti-spam techniques | Technology Tales

Getting Evolution to display images in HTML emails

6^th April 2008

By default, Evolution doesn't display images in HTML emails. It's a good security and anti-spam practice, but it's also nice to have the ability to override this behaviour. While the Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut (View>Show Images is the way to do it through the menus) will do the trick on an email by email basis, you need to add the email address to your address book for a more permanent approach. There's a little extra to make the latter work, and it involves heading to Evolution's Preferences dialogue box (Shift + Ctrl + S or View>Preferences) and selecting Mail Preferences from the sidebar. Clicking on Mail Preferences gets you where you need to be. The part of the screen that's relevant is Loading Images, and there are three options: Load images in email from contacts is the option that you probably want more than Always load images from the Internet because keeping Evolution's anti-spam defaults is most likely an excellent idea. Apart from sender whose images you don't want to see, you should now have images displaying in HTML emails.

Evolution HTML Email Preferences

Aside: The theme in use for the above screen capture was from Ubuntu Studio rather than SlicknesS, which is my usual choice. The latter makes the above screen unusable because the text cannot be distinguished from the background, and it's only for this tab that it happens too, a combination of possible Evolution programming inconsistencies colliding with potential theme design gremlins in my view.

What are we like?

22^nd May 2007

Over the history of the internet, I have seen halcyon online dreams turn sour, with the world of Web 2.0 suffering the same lurch. It was only in the mid-nineties that the web was considered a levelling platform and a place for interaction and sharing. It also was a lot safer than it is today, an ironic observation given how e-commerce has taken off until you realise the financial gain from scams like phishing. Human nature does have a habit of spoiling things and the result is the number of patches that Windows has needed over the years, that and the expansion of security software from being all about antivirus packages to the inclusion of anti-spam, anti-spyware and firewall applications.

You would think that the above would have all but killed off the optimism that abounded in the late nineties, only for it to resurface again with the explosion of the blogosphere and, of course, there is Second Life. But there are signs of slippage even in this brave new world: comment spam has become a scourge for blogs, though the likes of Akismet and the WordPress Bad Behaviour plug-in see off most of it for me.

Then, there remains flaming on web forums. In fact, what has prompted this post is my observation of the transformation of a friendly forum thread into a hostile exchange. It started out as a communication regarding the welfare of someone who needed to retire from the annual Rab TGO Challenge with a high fever. Everything was going well until someone poked a hole in another poster's grammar, yet it was the mention of fitness that really turned things sour, especially when someone’s admission of a 20-a-day smoking habit drew the ire from a fitness fanatic. While it was all unnecessary, it shows how people can mess up with technology: to realise those optimistic dreams that I mentioned earlier, we have to change to make it happen. For now, I suppose that we’ll have to live in hope…