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:copyright

[palegray.net]

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