Web-geeks...

**jAZ** · 11-16-2004, 06:04 PM

One of the cool "new" features in the latest incarnation of Hotmail is that it doesn't open images automatically when you click on an email in your "Junk mail" folder.

So I occasionally click on them to see what they are. Today I clicked on a bit of mortgage spam and noticed that it had the following link embedded:

http://ads.msn.com/ads/adredir.asp?image=/(some characters)/(some characters)/(some characters).gif&url=http://(spammer domain)/(path)

The link was clearly to an image file that would load for me to see if the message hadn't been in my junk mail folder.

It just occured to me that the link's path beings with "http://ads.msn.com".

Now I'm pretty sure that MSN isn't sending me spam (otherwise they wouldn't send it to the junk mail folder).

Does anyone know why/how this works? Why some spammer is able to use an applet via the msn.com website to serve up their spam images?

Does anyone else notice this? Or is it just a function of viewing the message via hotmail's web interface?

11-16-2004, 06:04 PM	Topic Starter
jAZ Supporter Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: Tucson, AZ Casino cash: $9847493	Web-geeks... One of the cool "new" features in the latest incarnation of Hotmail is that it doesn't open images automatically when you click on an email in your "Junk mail" folder. So I occasionally click on them to see what they are. Today I clicked on a bit of mortgage spam and noticed that it had the following link embedded: http://ads.msn.com/ads/adredir.asp?image=/(some characters)/(some characters)/(some characters).gif&url=http://(spammer domain)/(path) The link was clearly to an image file that would load for me to see if the message hadn't been in my junk mail folder. It just occured to me that the link's path beings with "http://ads.msn.com". Now I'm pretty sure that MSN isn't sending me spam (otherwise they wouldn't send it to the junk mail folder). Does anyone know why/how this works? Why some spammer is able to use an applet via the msn.com website to serve up their spam images? Does anyone else notice this? Or is it just a function of viewing the message via hotmail's web interface?
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