We already talk about why HTML emails are bad, but that is the default in most of the email service providers. HTML emails means some code is getting executed and rendered on your system. Maybe on a browser, or on a desktop email client.

Many people do not use any HTML tag in their emails, but then they have fancy email signatures. A lot of time they have fancy image generated on a website and they use the generated image URL as signature. This means every time someone opened the email (with HTML rendering on) the third party company will be able to track those usages. We don't know what happens next to all of these tracking information.

Last week I was trying out various desktop email clients available on Fedora 32, and noticed a strange thing on Kmail/Kontact, the email client of KDE. I run my Unoon tool to monitor all processes for any network connection on system. And, suddenly it popped a notification about Kmail connecting to mysignatures.io. I was surprised for a second, as Kmail also disables loading of any remote resource (say images) and does not render HTML email by default.

Then I figured that if I click on reply button (the compose window), it fetches the image from the signature (or any <img> tag). This means the HTML is getting rendered somehow, even if it is not showing to the user. After I filed a bug upstream, I also pinged my friend ADE. He helped to reproduce it and also find more details on the same. Now, we are waiting for a fix. I hope this does not involve JS execution during that internal rendering.

I also checked for same behavior in Thunderbid, and it does not render in similar way.

Please donate to the Randa meeting.

I just released Pony 0.4 into the wild. It came out with a 2 days delay :(

Pony is a KDE based image manager. The main feature is to create Collections out of removable devices and watch/search the thumbnails offline (when the media is not attached). New features in this release:

• shortcut key 'u' to get the upload to flickr dialog
• Hot keys: Now one can assign hotkeys using numeric key board , right now only %f (selected filename) is supported there.

Download the source or you can use this yum repo for Fedora 11.

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A massive jump in the release number and now we have translation-filter 1.0 :) Download the source from here. What is translation-filter ? It is a tool to imporve l10n quality by helping in finding different corner cases. This is being developed as a part of aukur.org.in . It is having two GUI(s), one Gnome and one for KDE and a command line version. Couple of the features are only available in the command line version. Different features of translation-filter:

• It can search for word(s) in a given directory or some selected files. The result will be saved as an HTML file or can also be seen in the command line. By using this features one can check consistency of usage
• It can create single word based list from the given .po files. It will contain both the term and translated string(s)
• It can check for any unattached dependent vowel sign. Right now it can find that for the Indic languages. Like ি and া can not sit beside

To know more about different options read here.

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I just released Pony v0.3 , you can download the source from here. Pony is an image manager written in PyKDE4.
If you are using a previous version of pony , you should remove the old db by $rm ~/.pony.db

This release is having many bug fixes and also new features.

Like:

• One can create media catalog (DVD or removable medias)
• Search media catalogs based on tags
• Flickr image uploading is now smoother
• While in FullScreen image viewing one can use mouse whell to browse through images

Here is a preview of the new catalog options

If you are using Fedora 11 , you can add my repo as building and pushing to the Fedora repos may take some time. To do so just drop this in your /etc/yum.repos.d/

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