A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Declan McCullagh]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 03:50:43AM +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> You can use web bugs embedded in HTML mail, fetching an object from a
> tracking server. This doesn't work with some mailers, however Outlooks to
> version 5.5 are vulnerable for sure and numerous other ones are as well.
> This approach is already widely used for checking the validity of email
> addresses.

Yep, and I've never understood why someone would do that. I read email
using mutt/lynx and Eudora (with "Automatically download HTML
graphics" turned off). Heck, sometimes I'll use /bin/mail or cat. I'd
never register as having read the email. Guess I'm not the target
audience; the Outlook crowd is.

-Declan