Can they tell if I open (xp)

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Most of the time I can tell if a particular E-Mail is from an “Adult” site and I just mark as Adult and then delete. But once in a while I will open one by mistake and then I will close and delete.
Can such an E-Mail sender tell if I opened the e-mail and gather any info from me, such as addresses and the like? I am not talking about clicking on an enclosed link, just if I ‘open’ their stink’en e-mail
I know ones can send an e-mail that if I open will send a reply e-mail to let them know I did open it, but such does not seem to be happening here.

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> Can such an E-Mail sender tell if I opened the e-mail and gather any info from me, such as addresses and the like?
> I am not talking about clicking on an enclosed link, just if I ‘open’ their stink’en e-mail.

In HTML mail, if an image is retrieved, then your IP address will be logged by the web server, but that’s usually not specific enough to identify you. A sender also can cause a parameter to be passed to the server as part of the retrieval process. The difference is:

Normal tag:
Web-bug tag:

In HTTP parlance, whatever follows the ? is the “query” and will be logged. The identifier itself can be email=joe@blow.com or it can be a number they store in their database that is used to uniquely identify you.

If you turn off the preview of HTML messages, and view incoming HTML messages as text (Outlook 2002/2003), you can avoid triggering the web bugs. And of course, you don’t want any scripts to run in the message, so keep it in a tightly locked down Restricted Zone.

(It occurs to me that a FRAME tag might also be able to pass a parameter, but I’ve never experimented with that myself…..)

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> Can such an E-Mail sender tell if I opened the e-mail and gather any info from me, such as addresses and the like?
> I am not talking about clicking on an enclosed link, just if I ‘open’ their stink’en e-mail.

In HTML mail, if an image is retrieved, then your IP address will be logged by the web server, but that’s usually not specific enough to identify you. A sender also can cause a parameter to be passed to the server as part of the retrieval process. The difference is:

Normal tag:
Web-bug tag:

In HTTP parlance, whatever follows the ? is the “query” and will be logged. The identifier itself can be email=joe@blow.com or it can be a number they store in their database that is used to uniquely identify you.

If you turn off the preview of HTML messages, and view incoming HTML messages as text (Outlook 2002/2003), you can avoid triggering the web bugs. And of course, you don’t want any scripts to run in the message, so keep it in a tightly locked down Restricted Zone.

(It occurs to me that a FRAME tag might also be able to pass a parameter, but I’ve never experimented with that myself…..)

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