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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.
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
Uhmm... you do understand that Mozilla and other E-mail client do actually have read receipts and that this isn't a "MS" standard?
The only difference in clients abilities with regards to read receipts is how they present you the uninformed user the dialog box saying "Sender has requested you inform them that you have read this message".
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.
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