Info about email read confirmation

[b4u]

Hi,

I was searching for a way to prove that a specific mail sent was indeed received and read on the destination, I found an online service that provided a very nice feature.

Resuming, I would add specific string to the domain part of the destination address, then their server would forward the email and properly control it.

I already tested it, and it worked fine.

But then, some questions came into my mind, about the information they provided:

1. Number of times the email was read
2. Total time the email was viewed
3. How many times it was forwarded
4. In some specific cases, it can tell also who was the email forwarded to

Now I'm just curious ... how can they get all this info? Just a simple info as how can they say the email was read?

I'm not expecting an email client to send that info back ... so the only way it to change my original email to include some javascript code to send info back to server ... using Ajax maybe ... but for all security alerts in the past, some email clients just block javascript until user changes that, and many users just don't have the knowledge to do that and will simply never allow it.

Am I correct?

Thanks

 

[keeleysam]

It does it by loading an image from the service, which has a unique URL that allows statistics to be tracked.

 

[b4u]

Originally posted by: keeleysam
It does it by loading an image from the service, which has a unique URL that allows statistics to be tracked.

wow! simple and precise ... awesome

Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

And thankfully doesn't work well with most mail readers these days, even Outlook defaults to prompting before downloading images from the Internet these days.