My IE gives last address to next. How to stop it?

[Prince_Serendip]

Basically, my question is all in the title. I had a full security check done on my system. Everything else is great except my Internet Explorer gives the last website address to the next website I visit. How do I stop it from doing that? I've checked my firewall, which is ZoneAlarm (not Pro) but it doesn't seem to have anything on this. Please advise. (Also, I use IE 5.5 SP1. Don't suggest I use IE 6.0 because it's incompatible with my very fussy OS.)

Any help will be much appreciated!

[luv2bsecure]

This is called a "referral".....there are products on the market that will prevent the referral from showing up in website stat programs. You can always just use a anonymizer service (many free ones) and they all remove the referrer (or give you the option to). You might check out GUARDSTER. They are new and do a very good job. www.guardster.com
It takes a minute to load the first page after you go to the free anonymous browser, but after that it's pretty dern speedy. It allows you to remove the referrer.

Good luck!
Mike

[spy1]

Programs such as Prox or Naviscope will block the referer if set correctly - a simpler (in a manner of speaking) way to do it (just when you actually want to, IOW) would be to set your homepage to 'blank' . When you go from one site to the next, simply stop by the 'blank' homepage, first.

Is that what you mean? Pete

[Prince_Serendip]

Thanks to both luv2bsecure and Pete. I appreciate it and have added your suggestions to my inventory of answers to this problem. (I keep a personal record of problems I've had with their solutions for future reference.) I found a program at ZDNet Downloads which answers this and a few other problems. Please refer to my posting at Anti-Ad Blocking.

Thanks again--very speedy too!

[Checkout]

I would recommend The Proxomitron. *Aside from dummying the Referrer field, it has many, many other useful functions besides.

* * just a dime's worth of info....yesterday I briefly tryed MyIe......using proxies didn't prevent the refferrer....

* * an online proxy service would seem a good idea...also as Spy1 suggested..a blank page....

* * I also notice resource useage was the same as when using internet explorer.........one rather odd happening was that when I opened MyIe a pop-up appeared...its not suppose to allow pop"up's *is it??
just when first opening.....was this possibly some outside action? * *I didn't leave it installed long....the thing with the refferrer blew the show.

* * * * * * * * * * * snowman

As for the initial question in this thread:

Have a look at IEClean at www.nsclean.com
If I have it right : it does what you asked for.
It's not free.
And no: I don't have any commercial interest in it * , I just love the program.

[PrairieDog]

Here's a trivia item about referrers. They are not just Web pages. The referrer can be a file on your hard drive--for example, a local start page, a saved HTML page, or *an e-mail. These sometimes contain personal, identifying information. I've seen numerous referrers such as this one in SuperStats logs:
mailbox:/C|/Program%20Files/Netscape/Users/john_smith/mail/Inbox

[spy1]

Hi, PrairieDog, and welcome!

Might be a more important issue than I realized!

Does that just happen with Netscape? Pete

[PrairieDog]

Hi, PrairieDog, and welcome!

Might be a more important issue than I realized!

Does that just happen with Netscape? Pete

Pete, thanks. I am not an expert, and I stopped reading logs because they gave me the creepy feeling of being a peeping Tom. The only mailer I can remember now is Netscape, but I would guess that every HTML-enabled mail viewer could be sending out standard HTTP headers (including referrer).

[Prince_Serendip]

I took up Pete's suggestion to get Naviscope. It works GREAT! And yeah, it has a lot of other features I like just as much. Wilders is one of my TRUSTED sites, and that's a huge compliment. I do "trust" as probability percentages (learned the hardway in old school of hard knocks). You guys are way up there. Thanks for your help and understanding. I visit this site often, so I'll see you around.

With best regards from Larry.

[UNICRON]

It gets worse.

As far as email tracking goes, If i mail you some spam, and that spam has a picture, and that picture is hosted on my server, when you see the picture, my server would have had to send it to you, and I will log that. Now I have your IP, and I know you are home. Stealth or no stealth I will not be fooled.

I can also link your email address to your ip by knowing what pic I sent you specifically. This pic can be an invisible pixel, and I could have the same pic with a thousand names, one for each email addy.

So if you preview a message, you have given more than enough to ensure you stay added to any databases, and to invite the black hats over. Webmail too.

Solution? Plain text for one, don't preview messages for another, deny mail client from connecting to any server port other than 25,110 and restrict its access to your mail server only.

PS by including this picture:

http://24.69.117.89/ipdefault/images/demot8.jpg

I will log the IPs of all who have loaded this page, by the requests for the pic.

Yikes eh? Don't worry, I am too lazy to read logs. It got old fast.

[Checkout]

Now I have your IP, and I know you are home. Stealth or no stealth I will not be fooled.

Congratulations on logging my remote proxy's IP address... *

[spy1]

Unicron - As far as the email part goes, that doesn't apply if you preview using a program like MailWasher, correct? Since you're 'pre-viewing' in plain text?

Just needing that clarified. Pete

[UNICRON]

Checkout, yes very true. Remote proxies are great for that. It wouldn't be difficult to determine whether your IP was a proxie or not.

Pete, if you can see the picture, then it had to come from somewhere. A GET request had to be issued to my webserver, and my webserver would have to sent it to you. For that you must offer an IP. Now remember that you must view a message in HTML to let this happen. Plain text and you are OK.

As checkout stated above, a remote proxy makes this relatively useless for websurfers (and webmail), but does your mail client use the proxy too? I know that when I routed lan traffic through proxo in the connections settings of IE, that didn't apply to Outlook. I think for a pre-viewer to work, it would have to be on a different machine, and cache all the images, css, and other embedded objects. That way your machine would not be communicating with me directly.

If you want we could test it out. I'll send you a email with a picture from my webserver in it. Then, when you read it, I'll see if I log it. I think it works like a read receipt without asking I'll make sure no one else could possible issue a GET for this pic. Then we will know.

Hey, what a great way to tell if the support staff for a product has even read your email yet! You can send them another email saying: "I know you read my email last tuesday! WTF?"

[spy1]

Sure, send me something, mister! Pete

[UNICRON]

I sent it.

[spy1]

Haven't seen it yet, Unicron. Did it per chance bounce? Pete

[UNICRON]

I sent it to the account you gave me the other day to test if it was working.

[spy1]

Check my profile and re-send. Pete

[spy1]

Got it and previewed it in MailWasher (still on server, supposedly).

Itdid say something about how it had d/l'ed the first 400 lines when I previewed it, which I thought was odd since nothing was showing except the sentence you wrote. Pete

[UNICRON]

I botched that one. The pic was actually embedded in the email (not my intention) and wouldn't be logged in any case.

I'll send you a new one later tonight, I have to go out now.

[UNICRON]

New mail is away.

This one does not contain the pic, but a src link to GET and display. It is all in simple HTML. nothin fancy

[UNICRON]

from what you said about previewing in plain text should keep me from logging the event. This assumes you'll never actually open this with HTML parsing on, just text. That is the real key (and solution here)

Also folowing hyperlinks in email (plain text or not) is a bad idea unless you trust the site not be tracking you. The urls can be carefully made to identify you. You can hide all you want with proxy stuff, *but if the url was sent ONLY to you, it really doesn't matter what IP you pretend to use, you have been detected and linked to the email. This is done with a bunch of giberish added to the end of an url. The giberish is a querystring that can be your encrypted email address (encrypted so you can't read it) or an ID num assigned to your account. When the mass mailer sends out its spam, it uses a script to tack-on this ID so they are different fro every person. A query string is not part of the url, but info been posted to that url, so it is not nessessary to create thousands of pages, just one. The stats parser does the rest.

[spy1]

Got the 'retrieved first 440 lines' message again when previewing w/MW (MW doesn't use HTML for its' preview, it's all plain text).

Calling it a night here. Pete