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I’ve been thinking about this overnight - I get these and usually it’s becuase it’s an MSN Group or Yahoo e-mail which has used HTML iframe coding within the e-mail for advertising purposes.
Iframes can run an invisible browser window frame within the web page and can therefore run scripts and malicious coding without your knowing they’re there.
I set my browser to not display Iframes in my preferences - Internet Explorer it’s Tools-Options, Netscape it’s Edit-Preferences. The newer versions of Netscape and Firefox can now display iframes (short for inline frames) so it’s advisable to disable them. It used to be coding that was specific to Internet Explorer but not any more.
I also set my e-mail client to display e-mails as text only and turn off the Microsoft viewer option (I am using Eudora), that way the iframe can’t run.
Just another way that HTML coding can be misused I’m afraid. I would suggest just deleting any e-mails which come up with this and if it’s someone you know they’ll re-send when they realise you haven’t got it.
This page - http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/tutors/inlineframes.html - has a tutorial on iframes with an example showing one working.