I am surprised that you're seeing leaks in Thunderbird 10.0.2. That is my own client of choice so I'm always keeping an eye on it after updates and I am not currently seeing any leaks... If you have remote images disabled, are you still seeing leaks? If so, which ones?
It seems to be the MTA (probably the spam filter), since it happens to me even without any client open, so there's probably no way to close it by your end.
If the address exists in Gmail, you get a response on "DNS Prefetch - Anchor", so it could be used to determine whether to send an email or not. I'm not a mail administrator but I can imagine how it might be useful to a spammer, e.g to stop mass bounce replies.
Got a "DNS Prefetch - Anchor" on Gmail