E-mail service can track actions of recipients

Some critics say that checking up on e-mail is an invasion of privacy.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
HACKENSACK, N.J. -- If Paul Goldstein's dream comes true, never again will someone be able to use the old "I never got your e-mail" excuse -- unless they really didn't get it.
Goldstein's company is rolling out a service that allows e-mail users to confirm their message was read, how long the recipient spent reading it, and where, approximately, the recipient read it. In most cases, the person reading the message won't be any the wiser.
For $50 a year, a person will be able to track as many as 750 messages a month, said Goldstein, vice president for product development for Rampell Software, a tiny company in Cambridge, Mass.
The service is likely to strike many e-mail users as an invasion of privacy, especially because they won't know that the sender is checking up on them.
"George Orwell would be proud," said Jay Gerard, a retired music teacher and avid computer user in River Vale, N.J.
Survey done
But Goldstein said it's perfectly reasonable for someone to verify that their e-mail navigated the many servers, routers and spam filters between someone's PC and someone else's in-box. Fred Langa, publisher of a popular technology newsletter, conducted an experiment in November that found 40 percent of regular, nonspam e-mails don't make it to their intended targets.
"Let's say you have a bid going out for a project, and there's a bid deadline, and you send it out by e-mail," Goldstein said. "You're going to want to know that every person got it OK."
America Online subscribers have a similar capability, but only when sending e-mail to other AOL users. Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program allows senders to confirm that their messages have been delivered.
But to confirm that the message actually has been read, the recipient must be an Outlook user as well and must agree to send the confirmation.
DidTheyReadIt, in contrast, will keep tracking the e-mail even after it is opened. It will show how often someone opened a message, whether that person forwarded it to others, and whether those people read it.
DidTheyReadIt will not show the actual location of the recipient, but the location of the recipient's Internet provider. In some cases, that could be in another town, or even another state.
Keeping track
To track a message, a sender adds "didtheyreadit.com" to the end of the recipient's e-mail address. For example, kladkonorthjersey.com becomes kladkonorthjersey.com.didtheyreadit.com.
That sends the e-mail through the company's server, where it gets coded for tracking.
The service is not as invisible as the company claims, at least in its initial version.
When an Outlook user composes a message in a text-only format, the received message contains a tag line with DidTheyReadIt's Web address.
"I guess that's going to happen to a small percentage of people," Goldstein said. But he insisted the tracking will be invisible for messages sent from Web-based e-mail like Yahoo and Hotmail.
The DidTheyReadIt service comes just a month after Google provoked a debate about the privacy of e-mail. The search engine company's new e-mail service, called Gmail, will scan a person's incoming messages and include advertisements in the window related to the content of those messages.
Under fire
DidTheyReadIt -- especially its invisibility to recipients -- already is drawing fire from some privacy advocates.
"We just feel that there should be consent, that people should know what they're getting themselves into," said Jordana Beebe, communications director for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego.
Goldstein said Rampell Software considered making the tracking more apparent to recipients but decided against it.
"It's one of those things that's better left unsaid in certain situations," he said.
The ability to track a message's performance would be valuable intelligence to e-mail marketers. But Goldstein said DidTheyReadIt won't make economic sense for mass mailings, considering the fees and the monthly limits on messages.
"We don't want people abusing it," he said.