russell turpin wrote on the receiving side my email client distinguishes between messages that are read and messages that are not i like to mark or save messages that are particularly interresting or important to me and even if i make a point to delete suspicious material immediately upon reading it even that might leave an interesting kind of trace on my machine you choose to have your email client do that you don t have to short of palladium you can do whatever you want with bytes you hold including reading messages and erasing the traces i ll buy a chocolate sundae for anyone who can show otherwise an attacker might be able to verify that you have read a message e g by seeing that you saved and edited a copy but not that you haven t if your email client was compromised you could put a packet sniffer on the line before downloading mail if an attacker installed a packet sniffer sniffer you could run it in a spoofing vm the only exception to the rule that your machine belongs to you is maybe palladium lucas URL 