We noticed you haven't been opening our e-mails

[Benko]

Speaking of big brother--yikes.

I just received an e-mail from Geico (my insurance company) and in the body was the above message.

How can someone--across the internet (I know you can ask for read receipt in local intranet outlook) tell if you've read their e-mails?

[l82start]

They way they normally do this is by linking an image in the email that gets loaded from their website when you view the image, usually from a database so they can put a code in the URL that identifies you (sometimes this is noticible because the image inside the message loads slower than other parts of the message).

[Pointedstick]

HTML emails have pictures; when you open an email with a picture, it loads the picture from a remote server. If they never get a request to load the image, they know you haven't opened it. You'll see these "You haven't opened our emails!" as well if you disable HTML emails or tell your client to never automatically fetch pictures.

Sometimes the picture is hidden, like a 1x1 transparent .png. Sneaky gits. Just tell your client not to automatically load HTML and you'll throw a monkey wrench into their system.

edit: this time you win, l82start!

[Benko]

Thanks.

[AgAuMoney]

I use Thunderbird, and it does not display remote content by default.  You can click a button to view the remote content when viewing a message, or to always show remote content from a particular sender.

GMail is similar.

Another approach used by mail senders is to also offer links to special offers, coupons, surveys, and even "click here to confirm ...".  This is a lot like the paper mailers companies send out.  They like to know how well a particular message or offer is received.  So they put bar codes, etc. on the coupons or web bugs in email, or tracking on the links.

After a long enough time with no activity from you on any of the various monitors, they assume you simply aren't reading.

The "We noticed..." line is simply an escalation of the "click here to confirm..." approach.  Got your attention, didn't it. 


One final thought...  Anyone with whom you have an ongoing financial relationship (insurance, banking, line of credit, taxes, dues, etc) really does need to know if you are still there.  Sometimes if they don't get the email "click to confirm" tracking, they will resort to paper mail or even registered mail.  And depending on the situation they might start charging inactivity or other fees.