Do companies know you've opened an email?

coffeehound

Just wondering: does the act of opening an email allow some kind of signal to be sent to the sender? I know this is true of company internal email systems, but is it also true of spam or commercial emails delivered to, say, your webmail account? Thanks.

glentoran99

yep its possible, and they can even tell where you opened it, how many times what time, and if you forwarded it and if they opened it

Carrot007

They can request a reciept notification but you can block these.

Most spam contains an invisible image link to their server. So they know if you even looked at it.

[Deleted User]

glentoran99 wrote: »

yep its possible, and they can even tell where you opened it, how many times what time, and if you forwarded it and if they opened it

And they can do this with the images in an email. You can generate these images 'on the fly' to match up with someone you've sent an email to.

Those images live on a server. Once you open an email with images, it will load them down from the server - giving the person that's sent it your IP address and the time/date it's been opened.

grumpycrab

coffeehound wrote: »

...opening an email ...webmail

If the answers worry you, check what your webmail provider does. Eg for Gmail, which I would recommend, read here
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919

AndyPix

ringo_24601 wrote: »

And they can do this with the images in an email. You can generate these images 'on the fly' to match up with someone you've sent an email to.

Those images live on a server. Once you open an email with images, it will load them down from the server - giving the person that's sent it your IP address and the time/date it's been opened.

^^ This - exactly.
Often the images are only 1 pixel big !!
Thats why its best to set your email options to not show images by default

esuhl

Also, viewing emails in plain text will stop images and Javascript tracking.

SouthUKMan

Yes, companies - or indeed anyone with the technical know how - can tell if an email has been opened. This is one of the reasons why it is inadvisable to click on spam email...no matter how intrigued you might be! Quite simply opening an email confirms that your address is valid which can then mean it gets sold on to yet another bunch of spammers as a 'valid' address. Don't you just hate spam!?!

I_have_spoken

So long as your email reader is set not to download images or execute any code in HTML formatted messages, you should be able to read without alerting the sender.

coffeehound

Thanks all, very enlightening. I'd previously been complacently thinking that so long as I didn't open attachments, I wasn't giving them anything. No wonder I get so much spam...

DavidP24

This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are workarounds for most email clients and webmail, they can even track how much you read, I have access to a system that does this

if you want to know more look up the websites of Aweber, Get Response, et al, these guys are all about mail being deliverable to the inbox, their analytics is amazing and you can embed 3rd party snippets.

That is just the legit software, the blackhat does even more!

Spammers are about numbers, they just figure if they keep sending you email you will eventually succumb or make a mistake.

I am working on a fraud project at the moment where a hacker is using an anti spam service to intercept emails. The anti spam service is pretty damn slick, but the way these guys spoofed it is even slicker.

Email is so damn insecure,

Considering the Internet was originally a military funded project that was abandoned, I do wonder sometimes if it was deliberate, "all we have to do is get people using this stuff and we can spy on them, hijack their devices, who knows what else".