[WikiEN-l] Broken link on your website

Mon Sep 29 20:42:46 UTC 2003

Brion Vibber wrote:
> If one of the list admins sent this through; please don't. It's *spam*.
>
> They crawl the web for e-mail addresses and then send these things out
> as advertisements for their link-checking / availability service. Which,
> of course, means they're crawling our web site and loading it down.
> *Thanks* so much.
>
> The HTML mail also contains a "web bug": a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF
> image which contains a unique ID number and additionally sets a cookie
> when you view it, which happens automatically on many popular e-mail
> clients.
>
This is one of those points where I give a rant about HTML email being pure
evil. Thank whatever that OE finally got a 'View all email as plain text'
option a while back.
Considered dropping web traffic from them? Cutting off a misbehaving spider
would be good... and this reminds me, let's make certain that the 'submit'
button never, ever becomes a link. Else eveyr bad spider will wreak havoc.
-- Jake