So a friend alerted me to this new service. It's called "Did They Read It" and it's a service that claims to be able to tell you if someone reads email you send them. (story)

First of all... on it's face, I have trouble with it. Sure there can be legit uses for it. But this idea of "secretly" spying on the person you send email to in order to see if/when they opened it smacks of an invasion of privacy and I just don't like it. I guess it's the "secretly" part that bugs me. What if there were a way for me to leave you a voice mail, and then secretly know when you listened to it? Without your knowledge? Does that make you uncomfortable? It does me.

Anyway... so upon learning about this, my first reaction (after not liking the idea) was to call hogwash on the whole deal. I'm very familiar with how email works and I am quite certain there's only 1 way for this to work. And it's a crummy solution that isn't reliable. But I had to test it. I had to take one for the team!

And so I did. I signed up for a free account and fired it up. Sure enough, it works exactly like I thought it would, and ultimately, it isn't reliable, and is growing increasingly less reliable all the time.

Here's why
It works like this: You send an email. It goes through the didtheyreadit.com server, they append an invisible image to the email you are sending, and then they send it on to the recipient pretending to be you. When the recipient opens the email, this image loads and sends a signal back to didtheyreadit, and they can then track that you've opened it. Simple enough.

Here's are the problems with it:
1) It only works if the recipients load images in their email program. Anyone using the newest version of Microsoft Outlook (read: millions) doesn't allow images to load in emails for precisely this reason! It's an invasion of privacy, and by default, no users of Outlook will load this image, and so the reporting will never happen. The adoption of this style of handling email is growing rapidly every day. Additionally, many folks read email in text-only format. This doesn't allow images to load, and so they'll never be detected either.

2) Spam filters are growing increasingly astute at blocking spam. One of the methods they employ is to do what is called a "reverse DNS lookup." In non-nerd speak, it means they check to see if the origin of the email matches the email address. Well the email is actually coming from the didtheyreadit servers and it says it is coming from you. Those 2 don't match, so many spam filters will dump this message. In fact, the 1 test message I sent went straight to the junkmail folder when it arrived. Cute.

So, the moral of the story? First: don't bother trying to spy on people's email reading habits. Second: this tool doesn't work.

And seriously, if this gains any traction, you can be sure that a cottage industry around subverting this will spring up over night. Just don't bother.

If you want to protect yourself against this, and you don't use the newest version of Outlook, just set your email program not to display images. (This will save you from those other icky spams with images too.)