Freedom to Tinker mentions a company called readnotify.com that also uses web bugs, but also uses IFRAMEs, which cannot be disabled by just turning off remote image loading. There’s also a mention of how these places can put tracking bugs in Word Documents.

readnotify.com is an email tracking system that uses Web bugs (like didtheyreadit) and also uses a trick involving IFRAMEs (unlike didtheyreadit). The IFRAME trick cannot be disabled by the standard countermeasure of turning off remote image loading. There may not be an easy way to disable it in today’s email software, short of turning off HTML email entirely.

Worse yet, readnotify offers a service that lets anyone put hidden tracking bugs in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other OLE-compliant document formats. When somebody opens a document containing one of these trackers, the time of the access is reported, along with the accessor’s IP address (which often reveals their geographic location) and some configuration information about their computer. [Freedom to Tinker]

So my question is, is there an easy way to turn this stuff off in Word/Excel? And I guess I’ll have to see if Mail.app supports IFRAMEs.

Dan Gillmor mentions a service called DidTheyReadIt and some of his concerns about it.

DidTheyReadIt and Civil Behavior

A company launching a new application claims it can tell senders of e-mail whether the recipient has opened it, and for how long (and even, in many cases, the location of the reader). “Creepy” doesn’t begin to do justice to this concept. [Dan Gillmor]

I’d just heard of another service like this called Point of Mail. How do these services work? Easy, they embed a 1×1 image into your message when you send it. So if the person reading the email has a mail reader that supports html, it will grab that image from their site. This isn’t anything new really. Spammers others doing mass emails have been doing this for ages. It’s a way to get a rough idea of how many people read your messages (and can be handy for pruning email lists).

Dan Gillmor calls it creepy. I agree, but also have problems with how they are selling this. First off, it is easy to block. Just turn off html or image loading for your mail program. I did this ages ago because I just don’t trust html based mail. Plus I don’t always use Mail.app for reading mail. Sometimes I use pine, which doesn’t support images at all. Yet there is nothing on their site about things like this. In the end, this ends up being a potentially very unreliable service for someone.

Oh, and one last thing about pointofmail.com. They have this nice open webmail gateway called sendnow.

pointofmail offers you a world’s first web mail service that allows you to send an e-mail right away with no username and password needed. You can send e-mail from anywhere – using your e-mail as a reply address or even stay anonymous.

It’s easy to use, free, fast, time-saving. You can send email from anywhere. No long-time logging with username and password. It is perfect when you are not near your computer.

Tell a friend about this exiting and revolutionary service and get confirmation when your recommendation was read.

I wonder how long till their SMTP servers are listed on RBL and similar places.