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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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).

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:copyright

[palegray.net]

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