A very, very old email tip to prevent nasty code executions from spam on email clients was to simply disable the preview pane altogether. But you have to remember back then that email clients were decidedly "dumb". Today they’re much smarter. For example, you can disable/enable the preview pane at whim in Mozilla Thunderbird just by pressing F8. In addition, just about every client has the ability to force-read all mail in plain text; this thwarts almost all spam from triggering web bugs letting the spammer know you opened the mail.
Webmail on the other hand is a different story. Your browser is not an email client by design.
As most people know, spam routinely has embedded images in them and as a webmail user you have no option to force-read webmail in plain text. So on the instances where spam accidentally gets in your inbox with embedded images, spammers are crafty enough where the images will display anyway, send the web bug, and as a result you get more spam.
Fortunately for you, the subject line of spam emails usually make it very obvious what they are. For the times spam lands in your inbox, you can bypass opening it altogether and delete without opening it.
Here’s how it’s done using Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail:
Hotmail
Change the reading pane setting to Off. This is on the right side of the screen when logged in and looks like this:
When you see a spam land in the inbox, put a check in the box, then click the Delete or Junk link.
Yahoo Mail
In the "new" mode, click View then Reading Pane OR just press v on your keyboard.
When you see a spam, right-click the mail and delete or check the box for the spam and click the Delete or Spam button.
In Yahoo Mail "classic" mode there isn’t any reading/preview pane of any kind. On mails you see as spam in the inbox, check the box and delete or mark as spam.
Gmail
This mail system by default shows all mail as threaded conversations. To see a mail you must click thru. If you see a spam, check the box for that conversation, then click the Report spam button.
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