OT: Disappearing e-mails
Apparently, disappearing e-mails is the new rage in some (business) situations.
Just a little rant here: If I receive such an e-mail, I’ll go get my cameraphone and snap a picture of the screen. The best cameraphones today are totally capable of snapping readable images of the screen. And they’re fast, so you should be able to get several images if it’s a long message. And yes, I’ve tested it, works with my cameraphone!
Heck, some of those services may even be susceptible to a screen capture!
A cameraphone and a screen grab was even part of the plot of the recent movie Firewall…
Another trend is ReadNotify. Don’t trust that either. Some friends tested that out on me a few years ago (I was told they tested it). Doesn’t work if you’ve got an e-mail program that’s severed from the internet when you read messages, unless you purposely allow interaction with the internet. At least, they never got it to work when they sent messages to me…
So, the moral is: This sort of thing works some of the time, but you shouldn’t rely on it. If you send it to someone like me (and there are many like me on the net), expect it to bite you down the line. If it’s imperative nobody can prove you sent an e-mail, don’t send it. And failure to get a result with ReadNotify, doesn’t mean the e-mail was never read.
October 3rd, 2006 at 11:59 am
Read Receipt Notification is so old-hat and so often declined that hardly anyone uses it anymore.
Mass marketers just insert a graphic tracking bug into the email or use something like LivePerson, and they can actually see you reading your email in real-time. Of course that assumes that you’re both online and reading HTML-based email.
October 4th, 2006 at 6:05 am
True, but many email clients, such as Mozilla Thunderbird allow the embedded image tactic to be defeated, by giving default options to “Block loading of remote images” and “Block Javascript in emails”.
With respect to the Javascript in emails, I can not think of any legitimate use of it, but I can think of many questionable ones.
Some legitimate emails do contain links to remote images, as a means to reduce bandwidth and storage of emails, but again, email clients like Thunderbird do give you the option to selectively load the images from trusted sources, as they do the delivery of Message Delivery Notifications (return receipts).
October 5th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
However, with today’s spam filter craze, we do need some way to be sure that our message was actually received by the intended recipient. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing that with today’s email, since the Read Receipt Notification can be (and normally is) declined.
There are some new email standard proposals. One is EmailXT (www.emailxt.com). EmailXT takes care of that problem by issuing a Return Receipt for every message that is recived at the mailbox. That way, the sender always gets a delivery confirmation.