New Software Invisibly Tracks The E-Mail You Send To People & Where They Are.
 

http://www.DidTheyReadIt.com/


E-mail Tracking Software Highlights Privacy Issues

Have you ever wondered if the e-mail you sent was read by the intended recipient? With this week?s launch of DidTheyReadIt from Rampell Software, you can stop the guessing.

DidTheyReadIt lets you track every e-mail you send and tells you if, when and how many times your e-mail was read -- even how long the message was read, if it was forwarded and the reader's physical location.

The only thing the company hasn?t said it can do is tell you what kind of snack the reader is having, but for privacy advocates the launch of this company will most assuredly further fuel the privacy debate.

The company says using DidTheyReadIt is remarkably easy. A user signs up for an account, and they if they?re a Windows user, for example, they simply download and install the DidTheyReadIt background tracker.

Once the application is installed, every time users send an e-mail through an e-mail application (such as Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora), it is automatically be tracked.

Macintosh users and users of AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail or any other Webmail service simply add ".didtheyreadit.com" to the end of the recipient's e-mail address. For example, if sending an e-mail to [email protected], users send it to [email protected] instead. The recipient will not see the added .didtheyreadit.com, and the e-mail he or she receives looks just like any other e-mail.

The DidTheyReadIt trial is free, but is limited to 5 messages. If you would like to continue using DidTheyReadIt after the trial, you can buy a subscription for $24.99 for 3 months, $39.99 for 6 months or $49.99 for a full year.

Useful but far too many privacy issues.

:eek7

I see no way this is possible other than a third party counter like thing added to the email. And that is already possible with any good counter out there, simply add it to the email at the end, and thats it... whats so special?

Weird... if its 100% transparent to the recipient this service is exploiting some serious holes

If the recipient checks the headers/source he'll see this somewhere... so it isn't "transparent". Of course. I'm sleepy.

It is not, there are no holes common to ALL OSs and ALL web based mail clients.. Thats simple bullshit. They do it with a simple html img tag, thats it. Dead easy to do with any counter script out there.

And a simple work around to get detected, simply turn off HTML emails, too dangerous anyway with all the script exploits out there.

EXACTLY

How are they able to discern the precise amount of time you're reading someone's e-mail though? I could see the server call on an img, but what about the duration factor?

ja.va.scr.ipt (damn the word is still banned)...

Basically, they would put a "onUnload" script in the mail, which would trigger when the mail is closed, just like an exit works. The script would either open a tiny popup which would close right away, or it would (better) simply call load an image in the background.

Its possible, I did it in one of my older counters. Its not exact, and does not work for everyone, but as far as I understood their site, they only guarantee to tell you when the mail was read and where it was read (where simply via geoip stuff). The rest is extra info they try to get, which is inexact anyway.

Spammers have been doing this for ages..

this will only work with html email...

Cool looking shit :thumbsup