I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking

In this post I discuss a new paper that will appear at PETS 2018, authored by myself, Jeffrey Han, and Arvind Narayanan.

What happens when you open an email and allow it to display embedded images and pixels? You may expect the sender to learn that you’ve read the email, and which device you used to read it. But in a new paper we find that privacy risks of email tracking extend far beyond senders knowing when emails are viewed. Opening an email can trigger requests to tens of third parties, and many of these requests contain your email address. This allows those third parties to track you across the web and connect your online activities to your email address, rather than just to a pseudonymous cookie...



https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/09/28/i-never-signed-up-for-this-privacy-implications-of-email-tracking/

#email #tracking #privacy

The Thunderbird Email Client Is Getting a New Look - OMG! Ubuntu!
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/12/thunderbird-email-client-getting-new-look/amp?__twitter_impression=true
#mx #email #mailclient #thunderbird

I'm sorry. I know you thought that validating an email address is simple, but I'm afraid that you're wrong here. It's a bit more complicated than you think. Quite a bit, actually. Allow me to illustrate:

What does an email address look like? For the most part, that's easy, right? We have a username, followed by an @ sign, followed by a domain name and we're done. For example: jschauma@netmeister.org. Simple enough.

Alas, it turns out that it's not that easy. And so to really understand what is valid (even if not necessarily widely accepted) and what is invalid (even if perhaps still accepted by some mail servers), we of course have to go back to the RFCs. We'll start out with RFC5321, and just to be comprehensive, we're strictly looking at the MAIL FROM / RCPT TO SMTP commands, as defined in Section 4.1.2. So let's start:...

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/email.html
#mail #email #validation