Spammers put images in emails to see if anyone is reading them. Instead of providing spammers this useful information, email servers should instead load EVERY image in the email and cache them for the end user, even for emails to invalid addresses. (Obviously some bandwidth limiting will be necessary to avoid DoS attacks.) Once the spammers pick up on the fact that they'll always receive false positives from the servers, the information provided by loading images will no longer be useful.

The purpose here is to allow end users to see the images in the email without having to override a security warning and without having to compromise their online identity.
-- kevinthenerd, Sep 13 2012

Except the vast majority of spam is filtered out before it reaches the intended recipient, so it never gets loaded at all. All you're doing is increasing the amount of traffic due to spam, likely by several orders of magnitude. Caching would also have serious privacy and storage issues (how long do you store the files? Indefinitely?) and would break the use of dynamic inline images for legitimate purposes. [-]
-- ytk, Sep 13 2012


Apart from all the fundamental flaws raised by [ytk], I quite like this idea.
-- hippo, Sep 13 2012



random, halfbakery