I know that you were referred here by this page:



This tells me what page referred you to me. So, I know if you're visiting from somewhere else rather than My de.lusion or MySpace.

I know that the IP address of your system is 68.180.151.106. I can often get a lot of information about where you are or at least who your Internet Service Provider is just by looking up your IP information at this link. Since I control the link that brought you here, I can encode information in the link. For instance, if I'd sent email to you that had a link in it, something like:

http://www.lusion.org/whatiknow.pl?your-email-address

...then when you clicked on the link, I'd know that you'd read the email, and actually clicked through a link on it. This makes you a valuable commodity to a spammer, since that means you're much more likely to buy something from me. Once they know this, they will not only send you more email, but sell your email address as known-good to other spammers. Don't do it.

This same information is sent to a web server when your web browser loads an image in an email someone sent you. Spammers could tell when you'd just read the message. That's why most email clients don't automatically show images in email any more.