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On Thu, 21 Sep 2006 at 14:52 (-0700), Peter Fong wrote:
> I found these two website http://www.pointofmail.com/ and
> http://www.readnotify.com/ which offers email tracking services. It
> surprises me that something like this exist. I'm not interested in using
> this technology, I'm just curious because a user have asked me about it.
Peter,
Looking at those two URLs, what I see is third parties that you allow to
intercept your mail (by sending it through them). They, presumably, do
the kind of thing that was mentioned by Greg (i.e., forward your mail to
the recipient with embedded html links, etc.).
However, I wonder how they can do all that they promise (e.g., tell you
when I read your mail and for how long it was viewed, etc.), given that I
read my mail with pine (a text-based mail client), don't look at links
embedded in the mail (unless I know what they are and have reason to see
them) and don't, or even can't(!), open attachments without special action
that I take only under particular circumstances.
About all they can tell is that the mail they forwarded to me didn't
bounce!
In fact, one reason I use pine is that I don't need to have spammers
verifying that my address is 'live' because they can tell I've seen their
mail.
If someone knows about additional techniques that would do what these
sites promise when the recipient is using a mail client like pine, I'd be
interested in hearing about them.
Mike
_________________________________________________________________________
Mike Friedman IST/System and Network Security
mikef@berkeley.edu 2484 Shattuck Avenue
1-510-642-1410 University of California at Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~mikef http://security.berkeley.edu
_________________________________________________________________________
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Received on Fri Sep 22 11:44:26 2006
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