I also don’t appreciate that apparently my opinion doesn’t matter, since “I’m not a resident of the EU” is a required field.
Which it of course is because they want to get past common sense EU regulations restricting their ability to infest people’s devices with malware.
spam is just unwanted emails, it’s not software, in of its self.
Also, the tracking beacons only load if you let it. I assume you have your email client set to not load remote content. (If you don’t, you really should.) not sure what you use for email, but thunderbird (mozilla) does it automatically.
Malware is any unwanted thing on your computer that either you or your system has to deal with, whether in the form of software, emails, or pop-ups.
Besides, they won’t just give you spam in the form of emails. They’ll also give you advertising cookies.
That’s besides the point. I use Proton Mail and a lot of Firefox privacy and adblock extensions to guard against this sort of thing, but I shouldn’t have to.
Not everyone is as savvy and aware and at least once a week, I have to use the computer of my mom who is the type who just says yes to everything and trusts that they’d never do anything too bad even though she’s giving them carte blanche to do so.
And yes, I’ve suggested that my mom switches away from gmail and Edge to Firefox and Proton or another better free email provider and offered to handle it and installing the extensions for her, but she won’t hear of it.
Malware is Malicious Software it’s a very specific thing, Cisco defines it as :
Cisco defines spam as:
Sally from Accounting hitting reply all? spam. Kyle sending out embarrassing photos of Steve to everyone? Spam. your fifth cousin’s baby photos? well, I assume that’s spam. maybe you like baby photos.
those chain letters? spam. but not malware. They might contain malware, but the email itself is not malware. For example, a malicious image, won’t load- it has to go fetch the image first. Until you load the remote content, it’s not malware. It’s just a way of pointing you at the malware.
That said, it’s important to note that Raw Story is a legitimate company that wants your business. They’re not going to intentionally send you malware. mostly they’re going to be using the remote content to load pretty images and set up some basic telemetry (essentially read receipts. Maybe a cookie if you’re using a web client for your email, or perhaps clicked a link.) This is true of most legitimate companies. They want your business, so they’re not going to so brazenly piss you off with ransomware or a trojan.
As long as you’re not loading remote content and clicking links, there’s basically nothing that email can do to you. you can train your email client to recognize it as spam and send it straight to the bin; reducing potential accidental openings.
lol imagine being this ignorant