Friday, May 21, 2004
Public Service Announcement: DidTheyReadIt.Com Tracking Your Email Practices
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 02:00 PM
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-05-20-email_x.htm
DidTheyReadIt.com is selling a service where you can send an email to [email][email protected][/email] and you will know:
• When they opened it
• How many times they opened it
• Where they were located when they opened it, based on the IP address their client used and some geographical lookups.
:evil: Fortunately, there is an easy way around it if you have good filtering capabilities. Just add a filter to block all emails that have the following code in them. Mailwasher easily identified it. [code] <img src="http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?code= [/code]
Of course, your Pocket PC Inbox won't trigger this as it doesn't understand HTML and some email clients like Outlook 2003 block the automatic downloading of HTML images. This sort of invasion of my privacy really irritates me, to say nothing of the fact that if you use this service, you are allowing them to see valid email addresses of people you are sending emails to. I know some companies are already using DidTheyReadIt to fire their newsletters from. To those companies, let me clue you in on my terms of service. "If I am your customer and I get a newsletter from you that passed through their server or any similar service, I will no longer be your customer." :deal:
DidTheyReadIt.com is selling a service where you can send an email to [email][email protected][/email] and you will know:
• When they opened it
• How many times they opened it
• Where they were located when they opened it, based on the IP address their client used and some geographical lookups.
:evil: Fortunately, there is an easy way around it if you have good filtering capabilities. Just add a filter to block all emails that have the following code in them. Mailwasher easily identified it. [code] <img src="http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?code= [/code]
Of course, your Pocket PC Inbox won't trigger this as it doesn't understand HTML and some email clients like Outlook 2003 block the automatic downloading of HTML images. This sort of invasion of my privacy really irritates me, to say nothing of the fact that if you use this service, you are allowing them to see valid email addresses of people you are sending emails to. I know some companies are already using DidTheyReadIt to fire their newsletters from. To those companies, let me clue you in on my terms of service. "If I am your customer and I get a newsletter from you that passed through their server or any similar service, I will no longer be your customer." :deal:
