Cheryl writes:

<<I have used IncrediMail for over four years and no one I send e-mails to
have complained. I do wish these lies would stop. Of course, use what you
want but stop putting down something "you have heard might...">>

1. Are your recipients  informed enough to know?  There are many users
whose computers are probably riddled with spyware and trojans who are
blissfully ignorant of the uses to which these things are put---until their
computers start to do funny things such as slowdown with browsing or a
sudden cessation of download allowances. That's because of all the
invisible internet activity going on behind their backs.

2. It seems indisputable that the Incredimail icon which Incredimail
attaches to each recipient email (the sender never sees it so is blissfully
ignorant) is in fact a trojan, the use of which, at my last reading,
admittedly some time ago now, the owners of Incredimail have never come
completely clean about.  The question is---to what use do they put the info
transmitted back to them from every computer which receives an Incr
email?  They plead innocence, quite convincingly so, but the question
remains unanswered as far as I know.

Are most informed security advice sites that rank Incredimail as a "no-no"
wrong?  Perhaps.  Cheryl may be partially right when she implies that a
reputation, once acquired, gathers its own momentum and may be hard to
shake off.  But I haven't seen any evidence that Incredimail's owners have
changed their philosophy. As far as I know, their trojan is still alive and
well.  Reinforcing that view is the fact that it is apparently a very hard
program to uninstall completely, and many invisible remnants get left behind.

That fact, whilst not conclusive, is itself regarded by some as rather
sinister, given the other evidence.  Whatever else it might be, no-one
could say that this software is badly-written (quite the contrary) which is
the usual reason why software may not get properly uninstalled.

3. I do know that after a friend of mine started sending me Incredimails,
my junk email filter filled up alarmingly quickly. As I suspected it would.

4. Maybe, as I do, some of Cheryl's recipients filter out all Incredimails
rather than take the risk of compromising their computers?

5. Note that the last research I've done on this is at least a year old,
maybe a lot longer, so that some of these questions may by now have been
answered---one way or another.  So I may have to plead guilty to Cheryl's
"you have heard might..." !  But I'd have thought that if Incredimail have
at last mended their ways, we'd have heard about it by now.

6. Having said all that, it's a great program, and such a pity it's tarred
with this particular brush.  Nothing's free.  Many people love it, and
that's fair enough---as long as it's an informed decision, and you're
prepared to pay the price of having a potentially corrupted system.  More
importantly, ensure that the people receiving such emails are similarly
informed.  Go for it by all means---it gives many people a lot of fun, and
the harm it does is probably fairly minimal.

Incredimail is one of the great controversies of the internet.  I'm putting
the conservative side.  Perhaps someone else can put the other.

Don Penlington




 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
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