Intrusive marketing email - how far is too far?

[CriticalThanking]

This may be more of a social issues question, but I'll start here.

I work for a large company with a correspondingly large budget. I get email all the time from companies wanting our money. Most of the time I either ignore them or pass them on to someone else to evaluate.

I recently got a follow-up that got my attention. It started out:

Hi!
You opened our last email announcing the [Nth in a] series of "[Incredibly Boring IT Topics]", were you interested?​

It makes it sound like they planted code in my email that lets them identify me personally having opened their email (and/or gone to their website as a result of the email). Perhaps the link to their website had some unique ID of the email. Perhaps they are lying and give this follow-up to everyone. To my knowledge, I did not visit their website, and I have no previous business relationship with this company.

What is your take on the right of a company to be able to track what email you have or have not opened? We block return receipts outside the company.

What is yout take on the appropriateness of a company tracking your website visit with personally identifying info, even before you had a chance to look at their privacy policy?

While I see nothing illegal about it, I find their actions... Well, I'll let my reply speak for itself:

Dear [assumed human],
I just received this from your company:

Hi!
You opened our last email announcing the [Nth in a] series of "[Incredibly Boring IT Topics]", were you interested?​

While that may or may not be a true statement, I find it exceedingly offensive. I can understand the business utility of knowing if your emails are being opened/read, but slapping me in the face with my lack of privacy is disturbing.

Can you imagine receiving an email from your department store or supermarket with "Hi - from our database we know you bought size XXXXL bra/underwear from us. Looking through your trash we see you have opened the package it came in. How is that working out for you?" The company certainly might gain revenue by contacting a customer. But can you possibly understand why a customer might be disturbed at having their expectation of privacy violated? I don't want you sending emails that tell me you are sitting over my shoulder watching what emails I open (or thinking about what underwear I have on).

I want to be removed from ALL contact from your companies [main company and their email marketing servicer] on behalf of you or any other company. I simply don't trust you not to put unwanted code (a trojan in my opinion) in your emails.

The above is the absolute truth, and therefore has nothing to do with the opinions or policies of my company.

Sincerely,

[CT]

CT

 

[MortFurd]

Most likely they didn't include a program of any kind in your mail. All they had to do was to send it in html format with an embedded link to a tiny graphic file on their own server. You view the mail, the mail program loads their graphic, they know you've read the mail. Since they want to know who read it (to reply to the correct person,) they just create a separate graphic image for each message they send - the name of the graphic file is a number or code that they can map back to the message.

It sucks. I wouldn't put up with it either. What I do is use a mail program that strips out html format and provides links to any external content - which I won't click on.

Outlook and exchange can be configured to force received messages into plain text format to protect you from that kind of crap.

Some spammers use the same embedded image technique to detect active email addresses - if the link gets hit, they know which address to spam even harder 'cause there's a live person receiving the messages.

 

[rjh01]

Outlook and exchange can be configured to force received messages into plain text format to protect you from that kind of crap.

How can Outlook be forced to do this?

 

[Furi]

In OL2k3

Menu > Tools > Options (opens mail options dialogue)

Select Security Tab and Change automtic Download settings

Select the FOAD Spamming cu Don't Download blah blah blah Check box.

If the company is legit, and you would do business with them normally, give the marketing director a ring and advise him of your disquiet regarding this data capture technique, something direct and to the point like call him a twat or "you have just lost a potential customer you ignorant spamming cockhead" or maybe you could just post their marketing and reply to addresses and anything else you can find on them into alt.test or alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.furry as your ident (making sure you do it from a pretty anon machine) or subscribe them to Furotica pic of the day or similar

 

[krelnik]

The technique Furi describes is correct, and has been in use for at least 10 years or so. The common term for this is a web bug. Googling that will get you lots of information. For instance if you use a client other than Outlook, search for "web bug" followed by the name of your client for help in disabling them.

Here is the wikipedia article on web bugs, there are some good resources linked within.

 

[CriticalThanking]

While I appreciate the technical help (Lotus Notes configuration and security here is up to another group - completely out of my hands), I am more interested in the discussion of what crosses the line for an external company communicating through, accessing, or CHANGING your company computer resources? Examples outside of email -

• software that cannot be activated without a live connection to the vendor
• software that reports your hardware configuration info to the vendor
• software that reports what other products you have installed
• software that defaults file extensions to their product

Thoughts?

CT