Open Radar

 
I can only configure Mail to either always load all remote images in mails or to never load any remote images in mails, in which case I have to manually click on a button to make these images load. What I'm missing is an option, as you can find in pretty much all other mail clients I have ever worked with, to only load remote images if the sender is in my address book (as people in my address book are trusted, of course).

The problem with loading remote images is that spammers use remote images to verify a certain e-mail has been received, so they know the address is valid and they can send even more spam to this user. Of course, if mail recognizes an e-mail as spam mail, it will never load images, regardless of the configuration, yet mail cannot recognize 100% spam. I'd rather have a "whitelist" than relying on mails junk detection to protect me.

Alternatively mail could have its own whitelist and I can either choose "Load remote images", to load them once, or "Always load remote images of this sender", which adds the sender to my internal whitelist. Though there would have to be a way to either edit this whitelist or at least to reset it (without resetting any other settings). I guess the address book approach is simpler and more intuitive to most people.