User Not Found, Email Drops Silently

shervinafshar writes with an International Herald Tribune story explaining just why it is failed emails don't always result in a helpful error message for the sender, which also gives some insight into ways that email can be used to spy on recipients. "In last lines of the article, two companies are introduced which provide services that can 'spy' on your email reading habits. They also can 'call home' too: 'Some entrepreneurs have seen that uncertainty and offered senders the ability to obtain receipts that a given message has been read — without the recipient knowing that a confirmation has been sent back to the sender. ReadNotify, based in Queensland, Australia, started in 2000 and promised to report not only on whether a message was read, but also on how long it was opened for reading on the recipient's PC. It can also send the message in "self-destructing" form, preventing forwarding, printing, copying and saving.' IHT also is asking its readers to comment about these kind of services being against user privacy."

Comments

Remote images?

[simcop2387]

What about decent clients that won't automatically load remote images and don't support javascript?

Re:Remote images?

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case ReadNotify et al are shit out of luck.

Re:Remote images?

[Creepy Crawler]

I use pine on my server all the time. That means I dont do any JS or image loading. How is downloading text from a mailserver going to "autodelete", "report" or other nefarious activities?

If they had my login/pass it'd be a different story, which could be gotten by ANSI injection in mail, but that would require a lot of assumptions, including platform server resides upon. We've seen those hacks before, including ones that echo rm -rf / \cr\lf

Re:Remote images?

[Creepy Crawler]

But Im not trying to get out of "readnotify" gunk. I use pine on my server because I can read it via a 56k modem. I dont need to download big nasties or anything else. All I need is PuTTY or ubuntu's ssh.

All my mails are there on the server for my easy pickings. No stupid stuff, and damned fast.

Re:Remote images?

[Smauler]

html mail is not a big overhead necessarily. All it is a markup language, and it only adds small amounts to emails if used well. If used poorly, it's diabolical. Blame the sender, not the medium - html emails do have their place.

Also, anyone who lets their mail reader access _any_ unkown outbound html connections is asking for trouble.

Re:Remote images?

[cayenne8]

"html mail is not a big overhead necessarily. All it is a markup language, and it only adds small amounts to emails if used well. If used poorly, it's diabolical. Blame the sender, not the medium - html emails do have their place.",

I was exaggerating a little bit on the amount of data being sent with html mail, but, I have seem some emails that were WAY too big, for the few lines of information they carried...with the wallpapers, and animated images all dancing around, etc.

With so much email out there, it all adds up to serious bandwidth waste.

Re:Remote images?

[Anonymous Coward]

html mail is not a big overhead necessarily.

Bullshit. Create a one paragraph message and send it with Pine or command-line unix mail. Then send the same paragraph with Outlook or other common email software. Look at how much html fluff gets into the message.

All it is a markup language, and it only adds small amounts to emails if used well. If used poorly, it's diabolical. Blame the sender, not the medium - html emails do have their place.

The sender doesn't know anything about what happens behind the scenes, they are just writing a message. Blame the software writers.

Re:Remote images?

[lostguru]

Ah, but most people don't read email using a client, they use a browser and a html frontend provided by their service (gmail, yahoo, msn) in which case the browser will run javascript.

Re:Remote images?

[KGIII]

Before one cries bullshit I'd suggest that you, and a few others in this thread, look at your email software's settings. Most, including Outlook, enable you to send in plain text format. Blaming the software authors for people not understanding? I think you'll find the people DO understand (to some extent) and they like it. That'd be why they do it. People LIKE including images, pretty formats, and the likes. I friggen hate it. I read and send in one format, plain text, but that's me. My newsletter doesn't even offer a rich text format. But don't blame the software designers, blame the people who are doing what they like. "Bad people for doing what you wanted to and horrific software designers for enabling them to do so! Email is only in one way and it is my way and if you're not doing it my way then you're a dolt!" No... No... Grandma wants to send you pretty images and sound. Turn it off and smile nicely.

Wanna know the kicker here? Without taking the time to read the article, I bet, you're likely one of the people who bitches about blowback spam. Which is it? Do the folks want to be notified when it doesn't reach the sender or not? Me? I'll take notification and delete the blowback like I do the rest of the garbage. I process a few thousand emails daily, all in about ten minutes to an hour depending on the day... I don't even have to use software to do it. I'm not even that smart. Hell, I don't even type that fast.

So, no... To get to my point. You're full of crap. Don't blame the authors for creating functional software that does what people want it to do. I'd have agreed if you'd thought that *maybe* plain text should be enabled by default but that's not what "people" want, that's what "we geeks" want and how we prefer things. It isn't our internet any more. It isn't our system any more. Today they're no longer users and the longer we can keep calling them users or lusers or the likes the further we'll split the divide. There will not be a convergence but, well, this digresses beyond what the topic is and I'll attempt to avoid that. It is easy enough to figure out who I am and use email contact but, please, plain text only. ;)

Re:Remote images?

[tomhudson]

Rich text can actually be useful, you know. The fact that pretty much the entire web opts to use rich text rather than plain text should tip you off to that.

My email is not a web page, and I don't *want* it to be one. Nor do I want to read someone else's "web-page-style" email, run their dorky embedded javascript, or download their 1x1 12ab95rtyd62534.gif tracking images. CSS Style sheets for email? Wallpaper? Muzak? Sick.

Re:Remote images?

[cayenne8]

"If you hate HTML so much, how come you use the web?

HTTP is based on HTML and you seem to be OK with using Slashdot. Why not use a proper markup language to format email messages? "

Because they are two distinctly different things. Email is not a webpage....a webpage is designed exactly for html presentation. Email is text messaging...it wasn't originally meant to be marked up, it was to be read as simple plain text.

Re:Remote images?

[KGIII]

I am not 100% positive but I'm pretty sure that they were doing this even before the advent of GMail. I recall, I'm thinking 2002 as the era though it may have been earlier, that one was forced to click "load images" from untrusted senders and even from people in your address book (which was a much discussed bug in the newsgroups) sometimes. I realize that it is not appropriate to point to good choices made by Microsoft and Microsoft owns Hotmail but, well, yeah... They even had a limited trial of "AJAX" near that time for the MSN9 (Australian) users where they had things refresh live such as email counts and news etc... (I also seem to recall someone found a bug and published an exploit for an xSS vulnerability??? That is distant thinking/memory and might not have been them, at the time people were still dealing with the Slammer variations and so I was busy with more important tasks.)

Actually, if one can time the Slammer year and a half they could narrow it down because my perception of time is fatally flawed due to being way too overworked and spending the limited free time with my buddy beer.

As I recall, now we're getting into some REALLY fuzzy memories, hotmail's links in emails still even opened in a framed window at the time. It has been a LOT of years since then, at least in my memory, but clicking links was prohibited and we had to use a copy/paste to open them. We could right click and select to copy the link and then paste it into our address bar. The link would look something like:

http://s129.hotmail.com/foo/domain.com/trailinginformation.html

But, as I said, it has been a LOT of years but they actually did this fairly early on and have since worked on it. As a straight webmail client they're not too bad honestly. With Live Mail they kind of suck more than they sucked with Outlook Express as an option for your Hotmail accounts.

Re:Remote images?

[uncqual]

Email is a just a communication tool - nothing more, nothing less.

Before IM and text messaging were ubiquitous, email served these roles along with the role of communicating more complicated (and often less transient) information. The IM and text messaging roles are now partially (and often better) addressed by other tools now.

While I hate HTML email laden with gratuitous and distracting images and formatting, appropriate use of formatting and inclusion of images helps communicate information more quickly and accurately. For example, appropriate use of bold text can highlight exceptional information very nicely without adding additional verbiage to a message. Similarly, a graph can communicate information much more quickly than the data in raw text form (for example in an emailed "release bug status" report).

The problem, of course, is that anything can be abused and become less effective. People used to abuse ASCII email by trying to make graphs in ASCII and used tabs - these were inevitably screwed up during display (esp. when included in another message).

Email has evolved. Our connectivity has evolved (remember the days of 110 "baud" modems?). To say that email should be restricted to 20 year old technology (maybe even including the speed of transmission?) at the expense of effective communications makes as much sense as saying that manuals should still be restricted to printed copies from line printer output (in monospaced font!) -- and that updates should be done via regularly distributed change pages).

Re:Remote images?

[nospam007]

Email has evolved. Our connectivity has evolved (remember the days of 110 "baud" modems?). To say that email should be restricted to 20 year old technology (maybe even including the speed of transmission?) at the expense of effective communications makes as much sense as saying that manuals should still be restricted to printed copies from line printer output (in monospaced font!) -- and that updates should be done via regularly distributed change pages).

I gather it you don't get many multi-megabyte power point slides containing 2 line jokes from newbie morons.

Re:Remote images?

[bickerdyke]

Email is a just a communication tool - nothing more, nothing less. Email has evolved. Our connectivity has evolved (remember the days of 110 "baud" modems?). To say that email should be restricted to 20 year old technology (maybe even including the speed of transmission?) at the expense of effective communications makes as much sense as saying that manuals should still be restricted to printed copies from line printer output (in monospaced font!) -- and that updates should be done via regularly distributed change pages). 1. Would you mind to explain me how glittering Headlines, dancing smilies, an eggshell-textured backdrop (of course alsmost indistinguishable from plain white), and the occasional Chain-Mail-ppt actually make communications MORE effective? Effectivity is measured in information per size unit. And for anything that cant be put into plain text, use a fitting attachment. (pdf, png, perhaps even doc and ppt if it suits you) 2. Yes, landline Speeds may have evolved from the days of the 2400baud modems, but i bet if you're stuck somewhere out in the wild with only a slow GSM connection (no WLAN, no UMTS/EDGE/whatever) you'll be glad for everyone who sends you only plaintext emails. So it's welcome back to the 20 year old speed restrictions, that actually ARE progress.

Re:Remote images?

[startled]

Gmail strips JS, and doesn't display images unless you specifically tell it to.

How much are people going to be willing to pay for a service that doesn't even work for gmail users? I suppose you could make the image alt text say "pretty, pretty please click the display images button", but most users still aren't going to bother. They'll delete the message or mark it spam, and get on with their day.

Doesn't matter.

[khasim]

Since their business model depends upon selling their "service" to people who don't know anything about email other than "click to send" ...

I also wondered about Gmail

[HangingChad]

I run all my pop accounts through GMail. Images don't load automatically and I keep javascript on a short leash. So, do those services have some kind of techno-magic or are they just spying on the weak, the lame and the infirm?

html-only email

[bcrowell]

As various people have pointed out, this would only really work if you sent html-only email, and if the recipient was guaranteed to have client software that executed javascript or something. I use mutt, a text-only email reader, and I have my mail software set up so it bounces html-only email (that it doesn't think is spam) back to the sender with an error message explaining that html-only email violates internet standards. I've never understood why anyone sends html-only email. Seems hard to believe that there would be service providers so clueless that they'd make html-only the default, and it also seems hard to believe that people would be clueless enough to want to send html-only email, but clueful enough to switch to html-only if it wasn't the default.

I have to admit that the concept of being able to get a return receipt for email has a certain allure. Recently, for example, my boss got pissed off at me and made a big scene because he thought I hadn't notified him about something. I happened to have a copy of the email in which I notified him, and I also happened to have saved his reply to it. But what if I hadn't saved the reply, or if he hadn't replied?

A lot of people send CYA emails, e.g., "Okay, this is to confirm that you want me to put the uranium in the crisper drawer of the fridge, and that you take responsibility for the results." But the recipient can pretend he never got it.

Re:html-only email

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood why anyone sends html-only email. Seems hard to believe that there would be service providers so clueless that they'd make html-only the default, and it also seems hard to believe that people would be clueless enough to want to send html-only email, but clueful enough to switch to html-only if it wasn't the default.

A few reasons:

- html email lets the author make their email look nice
- there are only about 10 of us who still use Pine, mutt, and text-based email

Re:Not really.

[EvanED]

He's not talking about replacing stuff like Mutt because it's antequated, he's talking about replacing things like old versions of Outlook/Outlook Express, or even old versions of Thunderbird.

Re:The kind of people who would do this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Print Screen is ridiculously easy to forge.

Re:The kind of people who would do this...

[Anonymous Coward]

So is an email, though.

Re:copyright

[palegray.net]

Please cite a case where copyright law was used to prosecute someone for forwarding an email.

Re:CYA

[stabiesoft]

How do you know the prof didn't use pine to read the email? No one would ever know if I read an email. Once the email has been received by my mail server, no one knows (except me) if it got read & saved, read & deleted, or just deleted.

Re:copyright

[speedtux]

Your question is a non-sequitur, but apparently one made in an attempt to score rhetorical points. I'm not going to debate with you on that level.

Re:CYA

[Phroggy]

How do you know the prof didn't use pine to read the email? No one would ever know if I read an email. Once the email has been received by my mail server, no one knows (except me) if it got read & saved, read & deleted, or just deleted. Presumably by "readnotify is extremely reliable for this particular prof" he meant that the recipient is known not to be a pine user, because readnotify has always worked when sending mail to this recipient in the past.

Re:copyright

[palegray.net]

Your question is a non-sequitur Hmmm... I don't think so. Let's examine the definition of non-sequitur.

From the Wikipedia entry on the definition:

Non sequitur (IPA: /nÉ'nËsÉkwÉtÉ(TM)r/) is Latin for "it does not follow," it may refer to:

• Non sequitur (logic), a logical fallacy (no fallacy here, just asking for citation of supporting evidence to back up your position)
• Non sequitur (humor), a comment that has no relation to the preceding comment or to an ongoing discussion or topic.(nope, definitely on-topic)
• Non Sequitur (comic strip), a comic strip by Wiley Miller (nope)
• "Non Sequitur" (Star Trek: Voyager), an episode of Star Trek: Voyager (doesn't match this one, either)

All fun aside, you seem a bit trigger happy and more than a tad arrogant. Perhaps you were having a bad day when you posted your reply.

Re:mail is just broken

[AJ Mexico]

What is actually truly annoying is all those "mail not received" and "blocked by our spam filter" emails that are out there. Yes. Amazing that TFA doesn't mention "backscatter", "bounceback" or "blowback" spam as a major reason that you may not receive a notice that your mail was not delivered. Many of the more enlightened operators of mail servers have configured them to silently drop messages that cannot be delivered, because otherwise, they are just doubling the number of spam messages flying around, by sending the responses to some innocent person.
See: http://www.backscatterer.org/?target=backscatter

Not Your E-Mail Any Longer

[Nom du Keyboard]

Once you've sent it to me it's not your e-mail any longer. It's mine to do as I with wish.

If it were otherwise then you're not sending me e-mail, but instead a license agreement to read your words for a limited period of time. If that's the case, then there needs to be a click-through license agreement first.