In article ,
Larry Dighera wrote:

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:20:06 -0800, C J Campbell
wrote:

On 2007-12-14 10:31:45 -0800, Larry Dighera said:

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:21:58 -0500, "Morgans"
wrote:

Microsoft Outlook Express

That will only affect those users who are ignorant enough to run
e-mail client program that automatically opens links embedded within
e-mail messages such as Microsoft Outlook Express.

Savvy users have nothing to fear.

Savvy users use Macs. :-)

I realize this is meant to be humorous, but ...

Does the web browser distributed with OSX (or whatever is current)
default to launching links contained within e-mail messages without
requesting confirmation from the user before doing so?

No.

Well, a couple of behaviors:

- Links in the body of the email are marked as such, you can click on
them if you want. They'll open (it figures you meant to do that). Social
engineering issues apply here. The default behavior is "no".

- If the email itself is html, it will display remote images or not,
depending on how you set up mail preferences. I keep that turned off by
default; if I want to see them, I can click on the marker where they are
to see the image. The default behavior here is also "no".

- All links will display their actual target if you hover the mouse
pointer over them. (There certainly a lot of oddball addresses that
claim to be "Paypal.com".)