Tracking the E-mail You Sent

Have you ever forgotten to reply to an email only to be cornered by the sender and interrogated as to why? On such a situation, it’s easy to claim that you never received the email, which may or may not be true, but that little white lie may no longer work. There’s a new snoop in town and she’s called DidTheyReadIt. The bane of privacy advocates, DidTheyReadIt “promises to pull back the curtain on anyone hiding behind the common white lie, ‘I never got your email.'” The problem is, the recipient will never know whether or not the sender used the service. It’s done in total secret and the program even lets the sender know where the message was read. Of course this all means that someone has to develop a program that will trap the snoop and let the recipient know that he/she is being spyed on. May the wonders of technology never cease. Read all about it.

June 5, 2004 by Ieleen Uncategorized 6

mdoneil says:

June 5, 2004 at 2:53 pm

Pointless
I can think of 3 ways to defeat features of this service.
1) Read mail from a text based mail client like pine (which I frequently do via a telnet session to my mail server).
2) Get a mail program that allows you to turn of HTML. (I don’t think the MS one will allow it to be turned off, but I don’t use it so I am not certain.)

3) Spoof your IP. Fairly easy to do with an application or a firewall.

I figure if I sent it and it didn’t bounce the onus is upon the recipient to read it. I don’t follow up, if they got it they got it, if not oh well.

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nbruce says:

June 5, 2004 at 5:55 pm

Registered mail
Then registered mail is also a privacy issue?

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Mock Turtle says:

June 5, 2004 at 6:35 pm

Re:Registered mail
Looks to me like the difference between DidTheyReadIt and registered mail is that with the latter, the recipient can tell by looking at it that the piece is being tracked. There is no stealth involved. It’s that covert surveillance aspect of the thing that sticks in my craw.

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Anonymous says:

June 5, 2004 at 6:40 pm

Slashdot story on this
Here.
Choice quote: “This appears to be snake oil.” There’s alot more in the comments there.

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nbruce says:

June 5, 2004 at 10:23 pm

Re:Registered mail
Why not just be honest? Could say–Yep, I got it. It was a piece of crap so I didn’t respond. Works for me, ha ha. There’s no law, is there yet, that says you have to respons to everything sent to you? At my OSU account I can just say it disappeared with the 200 SPAM I have to delete everyday.

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Korpios says:

June 6, 2004 at 3:36 pm

Re:Pointless

I couldn’t imagine not reading email using a text-based client (in my case, mutt). Besides, having my custom mail filter flag anything with HTML as spam is a handy trick. 😉

Now, if I could only get a handful of people I correspond with to give up their sinful HTML-email ways….

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