Portable is filling User INetCache

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dallas77us
Posts: 52
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 9:53 pm

Portable is filling User INetCache

Post by dallas77us »

Windows 10 Pro 1909
POP Peeper Pro 5.0.3.0 running as portable

Search found 0 matches: INetCache
Searched query: inetcache

Been wanting to post this up for a while, but I'm lazy and it's not a Big Deal.

Image (e.g. JPG) files gather in
C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\IE\profileID
which pile up in there by the dozens over a few days when I open emails with View message... and select Show images. The folder is not emptied when exiting POP Peeper.

The ONLY emails I view on a regular basis in POP Peeper are my subscribed one each "daily deals" from Fry's Electronics and Best Buy. Showing the images allows for a quick eyeballing of the multitude of items as it's much easier to see a TV apart from the smokeless grill without having to deal with all the fancy font detritus.

Both paths in Options > Storage point to D:\PORTABLES\POPPEEPER and there's nothing in the ini file to indicate storage to INetCache.

I've got a lightly configured CCleaner profile which cleans out that folder so, again, not a Big Deal. That I'm scrounging for deals at my fav retailers isn't a privacy issue for me.

But the behavior is unwanted. I need help to undo what might be a misconfiguration on my part or otherwise report it as a bug. Or... ??

Cheers.
"This time the Republic has gone too far." -Senator Amidala
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Jeff
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Posts: 9227
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2001 9:46 pm

Re: Portable is filling User INetCache

Post by Jeff »

POP Peeper uses an IE-based control to display HTML and that's where IE stores its temporary files. I'm not aware of any control that PP has over this, or even if it would be worth implementing. However, I already have plans to look into replacing the browser.
dallas77us
Posts: 52
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 9:53 pm

Re: Portable is filling User INetCache

Post by dallas77us »

Hi Jeff. Thanks for clearing that up.

I sort of concluded that, having observed POP Peeper runs, among others, Internet Browser, and Microsoft HTML Viewer and HTTP Protocol Stack (ieframe.dll, mshtml.dll, httpapi.dll). However, as you know, the conventional concept of "portable" is that no traces remain in local storage or in the registry once the process is ended. Hence, my curiosity.

A while ago, I noticed that the Microsoft Smart Screen Filter (ieapfltr.dll) is loaded as well, though I haven't dug into its actual functionality.

Being able to debilitate IE in "Internet Settings" along with your use of the latest Open SSL libraries and other settings (Storage: Headers, Block remote images and data, etc.) is primarily why I use POP Peeper to scan my nine accounts before opening any in Firefox or Thunderbird. I can pretty much tell by sender and subject what needs to be deleted from within POP Peeper.

All that and IMHO, the use of those "legacy" browser components pretty much eliminates POP Peeper as a target for zero day malicious behavior. Threat and exploit mitigation for IE itself is fairly well embedded in Defender and any current security suite. I'm not particularly wild about another browser. (I should mention I've also built a Shield for POP Peeper in Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit.)

So, care to reveal which engine you're considering? WebKit? Blink? Gecko?

Trident?? :wink:

Cheers.
"This time the Republic has gone too far." -Senator Amidala
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Jeff
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Posts: 9227
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2001 9:46 pm

Re: Portable is filling User INetCache

Post by Jeff »

Well, I believe that MS will be officially ending support for the IE control soon, so that's one very motivating reason. But IE has long been obsolete and it has always caused problems (even back when IE was Microsoft's one and only) in some form or another. For example, right now, PP defaults to IE10 support (assuming IE10+ is installed) because I've seen IE11-mode simply hang on emails that IE10 can display; but this is more of an issue with the HTML source and not necessarily the browser itself (and since IE is officially dead, it's not unexpected that some overladen newsletters have issues).

As for what I'm considering -- at this point, I'm still looking for viable options. According to my notes, Microsoft was supposed to release an update that would use Chromium-Edge at the end of 2020; but it's safe to assume that will only work for Win10, which is not ideal. WebKit may or may not have one, but they only cater to Apple/Linux, not Windows.

Mozilla offered an API at some point (or planned to), but it was abandoned. Off the record, that would have been my first choice.

Chromium Embedded Framework was the only one I actually found that seemed feasible. I did try to create a quick project and couldn't get it to work, but I hadn't put too much effort into it at the time.

I did another quick search before answering this and found another possible contender, which is Ultralight. According to the SO page I found it on, it used to be called Awesomium, so it's probably based on Chromium.

So, if you or anybody else has any other suggestions, I'm open...
dallas77us
Posts: 52
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 9:53 pm

Re: Portable is filling User INetCache

Post by dallas77us »

Thanks for such an interesting and detailed narration.

WebKit in its QT5 iteration is fully Windows 10 fun. I've been running a stand alone RSS client for several years for which it is its embedded browser. For the times where I need more to view that what's in the detail pane, a "view in browser" will open a tab where in the page will render.
https://quiterss.org/
This client will also let the user configure a path to another browser where "view in external browser" and, if not already open, open the browser and render the page.
Its portable version is... Portable.

You can check out these browsers as well:
https://www.falkon.org/
https://otter-browser.org/

Anyhow, there might be some push back from POP Peeper users who use far more of its email client potential than I do, but I think it's just fine with IE 10. Providing, of course, it remains viable.

Cheers.
"This time the Republic has gone too far." -Senator Amidala
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Jeff
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Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2001 9:46 pm

Re: Portable is filling User INetCache

Post by Jeff »

I'll look into qt5, thanks for the suggestion; I hadn't found that one before.
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