| This is a hot button issue in the sense that it "spies" on the foreign email reader without their permission. Many spammers use this same technique to verify if an email address is valid or not (e.g. checking if keyed-URL images loaded). A few responses from people who don't like this idea might include: - Blocking the service - Auto-opening and auto-reading "every" email that comes into their inbox (no way to tell which one was/wasn't read) - Being extra-careful, reading emails selectively (e.g. don't read anything after 4pm otherwise you might get stuck doing overtime) As you might tell, I'm personally not a fan of this. But if I were a lawyer, or boss, or part of law enforcement, I might like this idea. The current implementation of "email receipts" is very broken, especially in the corporate world. The thing is, if a company or employee ever gets burned by this, they'll block it. Most everyone I've worked with turns email receipts off in Outlook for this reason. Don't take my cynicism to heart though. Nobody has tried this idea in this way (that I'm aware of). It's very interesting. You never know how it'll pan out unless you try. Plus this is just the opinion of some dude on the internet; not a very good indicator if it'll succeed or not. ;) Best of luck to you and your team! :) |
Unless I'm reading this wrong, the service relies on the broken misfeature of many modern email clients that diverge from the original RFCs for mail by treating HTML as something they can process. A client that only handles plain text email (with attachments as something separate to hand off to an external program) is safe from this kind of abuse.