[ale] Lynx, Mutt and anti-spam measures

[Fulton Green]

Here's the question: other than possibly cookies (which I usually refuse)
and JavaScript (which wasn't compiled into my copy of Lynx), is there a
security risk and/or risk of spam acknowledgement if I were to have a
text-based mail user agent (such as Mutt) open up an HTML message with a
text-based browser (such as Lynx)?

Here's the explo: I rcv'd a spam this morning. Par for the course. And it
was encoded in HTML. Same ole' same ole'. But this msg. had something I had
never noticed before: the URL for each embedded image had my email address
(pulled from my domain registry, no less!) encoded within it! Obviously, if
I had opened this up within Outlook [ Express ], I'd probably be deluged
with spam by now. Fortunately, I use Mutt. Also perhaps fortunately, I
currently don't have the proper def in my .muttrc to enable Mutt to
automatically shell out to Lynx when encountering an HTML msg.

So if I were to add the entry to enable Lynx within Mutt, is there any way
that an evil spam msg. could force Lynx to request a remote resource? I'm
assuming that Lynx ignores image tags, and remember that Lynx only provides
links to frames if a frameset page is encountered. The only thing I could
possibly think of is the HTML tag that indicates "page within a page", and
I'd be willing to bet that Lynx wouldn't touch that, either. Any other
risks?

And somewhat off-topic ... what would be a good strategy to implement on my
parents' Outlook Express setup to keep the above scenario from happening?

Mucho thanxo,

Fulton

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