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.

Comments

Idiots.

[rice_burners_suck]

What a bunch of fucking numb nuts. It reminds me of the time my grandmother received a derogatory email. She called me to say that she's been receiving these for the past few weeks, all from the same address, and that she didn't know what to do. I asked her to forward it to me, but she claimed it had disappeared from her Yahoo email box. How could that be? Well, she had some neighbor, whom she claims knows a LOT about computers (yeah right), and he told her that some really smart uber-hacker put a "bomb" in her mailbox that caused that email to disappear without her deleting it. Uh, yeah. And did you know that those old 2x CD-ROM drives from, like, 1992 could write to a CD-ROM disc? (A silver, pressed one!) Yeah, some idiot told me that once, too...

In other words, anything that looks sufficiently mysterious is deemed to be magic. What a bunch of StuplePeopid.

Re:How it 'works'

[LiquidCoooled]

Thanks.

I think we already cleared that up about half an hour before you posted.

I KNOW I was wrong, I have been moderated down as such.