Has an email been read?

[Dave G]

Problem. When you send an external email how do you know
it has been read?

I have been told that this is easy as all you need to do
is embed a small image in the email, with the image
loading from a remote website. I can get my head round
how to do that, but it is the rest that I can't
understand. How do I know when the image has been loaded
from the website to show that the message has been read?

Any ideas?

Thanks

Dave

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

You can either use that method (also known as web bugs) or read receipts,
however, neither method is 100%, in fact, I'd guess you won't know either
way for a good percent of messages you send.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



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[Vanguardx]

Problem. When you send an external email how do you know
it has been read?

I have been told that this is easy as all you need to do
is embed a small image in the email, with the image
loading from a remote website. I can get my head round
how to do that, but it is the rest that I can't
understand. How do I know when the image has been loaded
from the website to show that the message has been read?

Any ideas?

Thanks

Dave

Web bugs or beacons are an old spammer trick to detect valid and
monitored e-mail accounts. It is considered rude to include web bugs
because you are trying to yank control of the recipients property away
from them. It is THEIR computer, not yours, and it should be THEIR
choice whether or not to tell you that they received your message.
There are products, like MsgTag, that will insert a hidden web bug in a
message (the freebie version also adds a signature line so the use of
MsgTag will not be unknown to the recipient). Web bugs are easily
defeated. Just read your e-mails in plain-text format. Or use
anti-spam filtering that eradicates web bugs from e-mails, like the
HTML-Modify plug-in for SpamPal. This removes the *linked* images but
not the embedded ones because it is the images that are linked that can
report to a server that the image got fetched. The service pack 2 for
Windows XP added an option to NOT display linked images within a
message, and many other e-mail clients already had this option.

So expect your new-found use of web bugs to actually tell you anything
about whether or not a recipient opened your message. You could use
read receipts but most users have it configured to ignore them (i.e.,
never reply) or to prompt when a read receipt is requested (and most
users then just say No). Also, I don't believe read receipt requests
are understood by all e-mail clients. A message sent from Outlook with
a read receipt request adds the "Disposition-Notification-To:
<senderEmailAddr>" header and "Message-ID:
<!~!superLongString@senderdomain>" (whereas the normal Message-ID header
is not anywhere as long and doesn't start with "!~!").