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Testing didtheyreadit.com's Mail-Tracking Claims
iosdaemon writes "didtheyreadit.com claims to be able to track your sent email: "When, exactly, your email was opened. How long your email remained opened. Where, geographically, your email was viewed. DidTheyReadIt works with every single internet provider and e-mail account, including EarthLink, AOL, NetZero, Juno, Netscape, Hotmail, Yahoo, and much more." Read on for more.
"This appears to be snake oil. I put it to test just in case someone had come up with some magical code. I sent email from a Yahoo.com account through the service, to an account on a Linux Box. Running tcpdump, I received the email from my pop and let 5 minutes pass before opening it. I left the message open with the cursor in the text for another 5 minutes. Tcpdump revealed absolutely no questionable traffic. And, the service control panel indicated the email had not been viewed. Sending email to a Yahoo.com account results in a 'read' in the service CP. But I had the message open for 10 minutes, and it indicated a 2-minute read......"
The company's "How it works" page explains the system to some degree; it involves redirecting all mail to be tracked through their servers by appending "didtheyreadit.com" to your recipient's email address. I doubt this is mutt-compatible ... Reader xrxzzy points out USAToday's article on the service as well.
To see if people read the article before posting on Slashdot.
This post is a joke so don't moderate down. Also I am aware that this wouldn't be really effective.
If the recipient is using a text based email program theres no way in heck anything is going to track whether the mail was opened or read. If its an HTML reader like Outlook just pop a web beacon and let your server monitor it. If you can't figure out how to make this work yourself, you probably shouldn't be allowed to go spying on others anyway.
There's a way to go off line? What does one do in this 'off-line' state?
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Now I'm going to finally get Bill Gates and tons of other companies to finally pay up!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Devious suggestion: Buy misspellings of their domain, then capture all emails you receive. Hours of fun!
How do I do that in pine?
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
And now we all DoS their site as we try to load that image to see if it really does work...
It seems to be good, just an awful slow load (which no doubt is intentional to measure the length of your 'reading' of the e-mail).
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I have identified this service to be a scam using the "superfluous female person standing next to logo" method. I'm still wondering where her headset went, though...
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.