securityiframedownloadhtml-emailsandbox

How can I prevent an iframe displaying an email to load images and other email trackers?


We have a web admin panel in which the agents can see conversations with customers.

Those conversations are the result of importing normal emails thru an IMAP connection. We grab the "untouched" mailbox files and we store them in a database. Then we post-process the files to index by "from", "to", "date" and so on and so forth.

Up to here, okey. We can seek all the emails involved with a client and render them at will.

Then when the agent looks for a customer in the web admin panel and opens it, the full email conversation appears. And we display the HTML version of the email within an iframe (or the text version if the html version is not there). 90% of the customers send HTML.

What happens? Upon the agent opening the email in our web, the iframe loads the "full html" and renders it. This makes "remote loading" (images, sounds, styles if so, and whatever) to be downloaded. This allows customers to "track" if we opened the email by appending tracking id's to the assets (typical http://track.example.com/image.jpg?id=123456789)

I've tried the "sandbox" attribute of the iframe html tag with no luck (it still downloads the images).

Question

How can I programmatically tell the iframe to not load ANY remote content, and just render the initial HTML without any remote call?


Solution

  • Mozilla's iframe documentation listing all available attributes for the is here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/iframe

    If you look at "sandbox" there is no restriction specific to image or other includes, just restrictions on things like running JavaScript. There are no other attributes that would restrict images and includes.

    To solve the problem of images and includes in your HTML you will need to filter the HTML either at the server before sending it or in the client after it arrives.

    Server:

    Client: