Marshall Brain's Blog

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Nowhere to hide: who really reads your e-mail?

From the article:

The people in my personal focus group (my wife, my mother, and some coworkers at CNET) agree that this is one of the creepiest things they've ever heard of: a new service that will tell your correspondents exactly when you opened the e-mail they sent you. It will also tell them how long you took to read their message and which computer you used to do so. The kicker: You'll never know all this information is being collected. It's a supercharged return receipt that's completely invisible.

The service is called DidTheyReadIt. What it does is insert a small tracking device, often called a Web bug, into the e-mail that you want to track. When your recipient opens your message, the bug (a one-pixel, transparent GIF file) is pulled from the DidTheyReadIt server, generating a logged event that shows when the message was opened and for how long.

This is the same technique used by spammers to detect if you open an email. Once they know you opened it, then they know that they have found a "real" email address and the floodgates open. Now everyone can take advantage of spamming technology.

What if you don't want people doing this to you? There is one way around it, maybe. Your email client would need to have a setting that says, "don't show me GIFs/JPEGs embedded in email messages". If every email program had that ability, then the problem would go away.