They'll know you read their e-mail.....

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-01-2004
They'll know you read their e-mail.....
3
Mon, 05-24-2004 - 12:19pm
I saw this article on USAToday.com.

I don't know that I'd appreciate someone else tracking the e-mail they send me to this extent. I use Outlook for business and other people can request confirmation messages when I open the e-mails they send me, but it only gives the date and time I opened it - not all this other information. According to the article: "Rampell Software CEO Alex Rampell says he's braced for controversy. "It can be used inappropriately, but our intentions are good," he says."

The road to hell can be paved with 'good intentions'. I can see where this type of monitoring can get very intrusive and be abused. I'm sure this type of monitoring technology can serve a purpose, it's also ripe for misuse. The part about possibly being able to tell the geographic location of the recipient makes me a little nervous. I'll think twice before opening any e-mail I get from now on.

*****************************************************

Now they'll know if you read their e-mail

By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY

An Internet service is about to test the frontiers of e-mail privacy.

DidTheyReadIt.com, which will launch Monday, allows anyone to secretly track e-mails they send. You'll see whether someone opens your e-mail, how long the recipient keeps it open — even where geographically the recipient is reading it.

The reaction could be harsh. "It will freak people out," says Internet expert Esther Dyson.

"It violates our electronic space in a way that's as uncomfortable as someone violating our physical space," says Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at technology investment firm Hummer Winblad. "Add this company to the long list of people who are making the Internet a less attractive place to live and work."

The service comes from Rampell Software of Cambridge, Mass. DidTheyReadIt.com will cost $50 a year. You register on the Web site, and then every time you send an e-mail, you add .didtheyreadit.com to the end. An e-mail address would look like this: president@whitehouse.gov.didtheyreadit.com.

You can also download software that adds tracking code to all outgoing e-mail.

Next, you go to the Web site, log in, and see a list of all the e-mails you've sent through the service. A box shows what time each e-mail was read, how long it was kept open, whether it was read multiple times and the Internet service provider that was used by the recipient when opening it.

In most cases, the site will be able to tell you the city where the e-mail was read — though not the specific address. It can also tell you if the recipient forwarded the e-mail (though not to whom it was sent), and whether it was read by the people to whom it was forwarded.

DidTheyReadIt is invisible to the recipient. It works with any kind of e-mail, including Web-based e-mail such as Hotmail. DidTheyReadIt maintains that it collects no other information about either e-mail senders or the recipients.

An existing service called MessageTag can track whether an e-mail was opened. AOL can do the same for e-mail sent to other AOL users. But neither allows the extensive monitoring of DidTheyReadIt.

Rampell Software CEO Alex Rampell says he's braced for controversy. "It can be used inappropriately, but our intentions are good," he says.

The tracking service could be used by job hunters who want to see if their résumés were read, or by salespeople wanting to track pitches. Today's spam filters can sometimes block e-mail sent with attachments, leaving the sender thinking an e-mail got through when it didn't. This is a way to check. "It can be useful peace of mind to know people got your e-mail," Rampell says.

While many e-mail users will feel DidTheyReadIt invades their privacy, many also will feel torn, predicts Youngjin Yoo, professor of information systems at Case Western Reserve University. "You will want to know how others treat your e-mail messages even if you don't necessary want others to know how you are treating theirs," Yoo says.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 05-24-2004 - 12:49pm

The emailers this would serve the most are spammers. Most people I know have spam filters in place.


I only receive email from

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Mon, 05-24-2004 - 2:32pm
I would think it would be quite easy to defeat this message.

If you have outlook, you should have your preview pane turned off because this automatically can launch html/asp/script codes embedded in the message. Can be dangerous.

It appears that your email is actually being forwarded to their server and then sent from there. They probably attach some HTML code or similar method to the body of the email that when the email is opened it sends a request to their webserver with the informaton in it.

You should be able to setup filter rules that work something like if "didtheyreadit" is in the header delete the message immediatly. Sure you don't read the message but who would do this to friends or colleagues. Or you could setup an autoreply that if it finds the email it 1 replies with something like "I did not get this message as it invaded my privacy, this message was replied to automatically then deleted. I never saw the message. Please resend without this service." and then autodeletes the message.

I dont think this will catch on. Now when an industry standard is set for SMTP or POP servers then we need to worry.

Jim

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-01-2004
Mon, 05-24-2004 - 3:55pm
Jim,

Thanks for the tip on the Outlook preview pane; as it happens I do use the preview pane so I'll turn it off to prevent these problems. I have the option to automatically mark messages as "read" turned off; I have to manually mark them as read, which in turn generates the "read receipt" response to the sender - so that happens when I'm ready for it to happen - at least for now. ;0)

I will definitely review my web-based e-mail filtering rules as well as Outlook filtering rules to try to filter out any e-mails with this heading. Thank you for these tips! The last thing I need is more e-mails flooding my in-boxes, saying "I know you got my e-mail on X day at X time, you had it open for X minutes and forwarded to 3 people, so where's your answer?!"

ladybug