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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.
All I have to do is read my mail when I'm not on line.
Nothing to see here, nothing at all.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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)
:(){
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.
Sounds to me like they just embed a simgle pixel gif in the message, and monitor when they recieve the request for it.
How they monitor the length of time the mail stays open is a bit of a mystery.
Turn off 'Download images' and I'd imagine their system becomes useless.
Wasn't there a scare about spam merchants doing this once?
C-x C-s C-x k
just set your mail client to not download images
If you can't trust the service, and you obviously can't, I don't think there's a very good reason to use it. Unless it works for every single message it's no good. It is a pretty neat idea, but the tinfoil hat crowd will most likely scream and shout about their privacy being invaded.
Martin
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.
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
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. :)
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".
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.
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
Does anyone else find it depressing that the entire privacy issue this service (creates? no... inflames?) hinges on the fact that 99% of Internet users probably don't know whether they're reading email as HTML or plain text?
Devious suggestion: Buy misspellings of their domain, then capture all emails you receive. Hours of fun!
Clearly, this service isn't being marketed to the SlashDot crowd. The very IDEA of this service reeks of "mass market", which we are not. (Though, with all the MSFT ads, we're getting closer every year. I'm just waiting until I see AOL ads on SlashDot. That'll be the day...)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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.
Wouldn't this be a great way to harvest thousands or millions of known good email addresses?
The TOS only states that they will not store the emails -- yet their own logs will contain the email addresses. There is nothing in the TOS that explicitly prevents them from using those addresses.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Now I'll be able to find out if the boss is actually reading my email!
:)
heh - and he says he doesn't get it
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
In my personal opinion, I think this might actually be a good thing. Considering the fact that didtheyreadit.com uses external images for tracking, and that they're getting a whole bunch of publicity right now (partially due to this very article), this is just another reason for email clients to block external images by default - spam apparently not being a big enough reason yet.
:)
With a bit of luck, this will make more sites and clients want to implement image blocking, which will in turn make it harder for spammers to get their messages across.
Spam is merely an annoyance to most people. Privacy issues are not.
Now whould you like to pay for an email service that doesn't even have a fallback mailserver and is likely be busy handling mail for info@didtheyreadit.com.didtheyreadit.com.didtheyr
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
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.
I signed up for a free account. It does work, it's fast and convenient enough. But there's a major problem...
.didtheyreadit.com to any victim address, and dtri1.rampellsoft.com will relay the message to the victim. I'd say this service has a 10% chance of survival.
INSTANT OPEN RELAY.
All a spammer has to do is forge their From address (the only means of relay authentication!) and append
Guess what folks. There's no law that says you have to let a megacorp run your e-mail. With a fixed IP and a 24/7 server, you can run your own server. (Though, admittedly, it's not something a novice can make work.)
All this is is simple "web bug" HTML IMG link spying. Anyone with any kind of sense has configured their e-mail client to not automatically download remote images. Or even to not display HTML crap at all. And please don't tell me that they use Javashi^H^Hcript, because that means there's a brain-damaged popular e-mail program out there that allows it (or a webmail site that doesn't filter it). All we need is another way for e-mail to run wild code.
Is anyone else getting a flashback to the all the stupid ideas that would burn through millions of dollars in VC cash back in the dot-com bubble days?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
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!
OK, so, who's going to set up a free service that duplicates what DidTheyReadIt does. It uses almost no bandwidth (you're only loading a 1x1 pixel image off a webserver). I'd do it if I had any hosting capability whatsoever.
The entire point of a free service would be 1) to educate people as to why this is pointless and 2) to make it unprofitable and drive these people out of business.
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
The shocking thing was, in the interview, the founder/inventor(not)/designer/coder whatever he was, claimed that large large portions of mail actually gets lost on the internet.
A gentleman called in from a design engineering firm who emails large documents to other members of the firm and other associates around the country. The "expert" insisted that the didtheyreadit.com was the perfect service for them to assure that their emails made it there and were in fact read.
My question was this, how does email between two people who regularly email each other, and are probably expecting it, "get lost"? This was a major point that the guy was making, which seemed to me like he was spreading classic FUD.
Lets make sure that our friends aren't using this product for those reasons! Assure them that undeliverable mail will be properly reported back to them always, and show them how to set their mail clients to always accept mail from those in their address books!
-Mikey P
I'd show you what a dump of an 118-byte-long version of their JPEG image looks like, but the Slashdot Lameness Filter didn't like all those "junk" characters! However, you can view the dump here: http://jzap.com/img/ReadItBug.jpeg.txt