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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.
Here's a working link: http://www.didtheyreadit.com/.
<img src="http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?cod e=2f985e815bd2b46450e
07957611ab6c9" width="1" height="1" />
So not only will it not work in text-based email clients (such as mutt), it won't work in modern versions of Outlook which block inline images by default.
(It was nice enough to leave my plain-old-text message - "blah blah blah" - alone in the original format, as well as adding a text/html mangled version.)
This flies in the face of science.
Well, it will tell you when they opened the email/how many times/etc. (assuming they have an html enabled email client.) It works w/ yahoo mail but not with pine. The infinite refresh to tell how long they read the email for is annoying in that it makes it look like the email never finished loading. Can someone see how outlook responds to this? (I haven't a windows box)
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considering the non-friendly hack that you need to go through to get this working, wouldn't it be better to capture the data sent by Outlook and OE's read receipts and implement something compatible in Mozilla and other email clients.
I only say use the Outlook 'standard' because it doesn't seem there's any others, and it'd be a bit useless if we had multiple versions.
If we want read receipts, that is. Personally I turn them off, and don't send them.
just set your mail client to not download images
Nothing special, just "Webbug" images, which spamfilters such as SpamAssasin (in the default setting) adds point to as more likely to be spam, so using DidTheyReadIt users mail is more likely to end up in a spamfolder than any other type of mail.
On another note, I find it's walking on the thin red line of immoral behavior, and I know here in Denmark there've been several companies who've got bad publicity because of using said method.
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
Perhaps the single pixel gif never finishes loading. That way, as long as the connection remains open, the web server clocks how long you're on the image.
This is not very useful as it is only tracking the images that are being loaded when the email is being viewed. However, most email clients now block these inline images from being loaded so this software will not function. In text based email clients it also will not function at all. These features have already been included in such email clients as evolution.
The time is probably calculated by not actually sending the image file, or sending it very slowly. So they just keep the HTTP session open, then note when the client closes. That would limit the tracking time to when the connection times out. Like the author said, he left the Yahoo mail open for 10 minutes and it only reported 2.
An additional note, Yahoo does have an option to disable remote images, which would also break this.
Seems this company is too late to the party. Almost all current e-mail clients now don't or have an option to not to load remote images.
Of course, if you use an email program that's that, umm, "open", they could just embed a trojan in it and add features like listening to what you say when you open the mail, and pictures of you reading it. :)
At the bottom of the mail is:
Oh well. Should prove very effective against those without the sense to turn off images anyway. Lets hear it for making money from people's ignorance!
C-x C-s C-x k
http://www.rampellsoft.com/, the people bringing you didtheyreadit looks to me like a really evil company.
/me goes back to kmail in text/plain by default, happy, safe, and in privacy.
software products to make your life on a computer easier and more efficient. by secretly spying on your spouse, kids and employees.
Oh, sorry, record, my bad.
By default, Google mail has images turned off. You have to click a link at the top of the message to force it to load the images.
Most other mailers also have a way to turn off image loading because spammers have been using this tracking technique for a long time. If mailers don't allow image blocking yet, I'm sure that a service like this will get them to add that trivial feature.
As to Gmail, I don't know, but from what I've heard it works in a similar way.
Also, the newer versions of AOL diasable images in emails by default, requiring the user to click on an 'Enable images and links' option on each email they want to see images/have working links in.
Having email clients disable images by default (Which sems to be an increasing trend) will relegate this 'service' to the wasteland of failed dot coms pretty quickly, I'd think. When this happens, I wont be one to shed a tear. I have no desire for anyone that emails me to be able track if I have read their message. If I have, and I choose to respond to it, then they know. If I don't respond, they can keep guessing.
Not that I let my email client load images anyway, but just because I'm spiteful, I think I'll go add /etc/hosts file. (c:\windows\hosts in win98, C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ in XP, )
"127.0.0.1 didthereadit.com" to my
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
If you're wanting to use something along these lines, a more up-front company that doesn't use invisible web bugs is HaveTheyReadItYet.
They use images of stamps, which are customizable, which is kind of a cool idea.
However, this only available for Windows.
just put:
127.0.0.1 didtheyreadit.com
In your hosts file...
Or put an authoritative zone in your DNS servers if you have access.
Done, no query reaches their server.
However, this option must be hunted down and turned on.
Hotmail does one better, and allows you to block all images from loading by default, and set rules so certain senders' images will always load as well as viewing images in a piece of mail on a case-by-case basis.
It's also defeated by web proxies that are set to block them. I recommmend privoxy, the descendant of that wonderful web proxy JunkBuster.
Outlook 2002:
0 \O utlook\Options\Mail\ReadAsPlain
To suppress all HTML rendering, add this key as a DWORD with value 1.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.
Outlook 2003:
I don't use this, but I understand there are preference settings in the app itself to suppress external images and possibly even turn off HTML.
There is another company that claims to do this, ReadNotify.
It looks to be exactly the same kind of service as Didtheyreadit.com.
I first became aware of this company by reading Mozilla's bug report 28327 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28327 (cut/paste URL and open in new window).
Mozilla/Thunderbird also has trouble completely blocking all server contact in email, as it evidently doesn't sandbox the email environment enough (images may be blocked, but stylesheets and other external URL's can still leak through, last I checked).
BTW, there is a workaround if you use Mozilla/Thunderbird: set your View/Message Body As settings to "Simple HTML", or better yet, "Plain Text". This works 100%!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
You can do this without using an image or JavaScript, and give away nothing in the source of the message. Here's one way, using Apache, .htaccess, and PHP:
.htaccess:
.css
.css under this directory will now be run as if it were a PHP script.
... any reader that accepts HTML messages will trigger track_message.php, and nothing unusual will be visible in source code, even if some curious person pulls down http://your.server.com/your.css to take a look.
1) In the header of your HTML e-mail message, load up a style sheet:
<style type="text/css">
@import "http://your.server.com/your.css";
</style>
2) In the server directory containing your CSS file, add the following line to
AddType application/x-httpd-php
Any file ending in
3) Save this as your.css:
<?php
require "track_message.php";
?>
Done. No images, no JavaScript
I'm sorry, it isn't either novel or non-trivial. I've been using this technique since 1997, when I read it as a recommended technique in a book on CGI programming that had been published years before.
It is obvious. In fact, it's about the easiest way of solving the problem of a CGI script that produces an image, let alone cache-busting.