confused about Mail and image loading

[coldt]

Dear All,
I cannot explain what happened a day ago, and I hope that someone can help:

• I know for sure that I had remote image loading disabled, for my iPhone 11, running iOS 15.1.
• but a day ago I accidentally clicked on a spam mail, and I briefly saw that it showed an image.
• after that, Mail counted 36 mails in my inbox, even after I deleted them all, that is, 0 mails really there! I never had that problem before, and if it's a coincidence, it's very odd indeed.
• Apple support suggested that I install 15.2.1, which I did, and the mail-count error is no longer showing up.
• However, I cannot find any option to disable remote image loading, not in the Mail and not in Privacy settings. The search feature in Settings still shows a hit for "Load Remote Images", but that's an empty promise I'm afraid.

For what it's worth, I copied the spam mail into a text editor via a text-based mail-reader, and it featured a png image, and references to "so-geht-es-besser.ru" and "mullapoodoors.com"; it's subject was "online nachricht".

Question 1: How to re-disable the remote images??

Question 2: Is there any danger of some sophisticated malware persisting?

Kind regards
Coldt

 

[Taz Mangus]

Settings->Mail->Privacy Protection, click on “Learn more…”. That will answer some of your questions.