Does anyone know if this software will block the kind of email tagging described on this website?: http://www.msgtag.com/home/
I have a philosophical objection to a sender in a public domain thinking they have the right to be notified if/when I choose to read my email. If MS Anti Spyware won't block it then will any of the other security progs commonly used do the job? I have ZA Pro as well as Norton System Works 2002.05 and regularly run other tools such as Spybot S&D and Adaware SE. My system is clean and always has been but this email tagging strikes me as an invasion of privacy. Any opinions?

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him to fish and his wife will never forgive you.

Yeah, my instinctive respose is 'get stuffed', oops I mean 'don't send'.

In answer to your question, no I don't believe that MS antispyware AKA giant has that consideration. It is an intrusive demand, not malware.

The problem with the software is it supposedly doesn't give the recipient an option to refuse the acknowledgement. It claims to automatically trigger the response. That is the objectionable aspect. There should be a way to block this type of intrusion.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him to fish and his wife will never forgive you.

I'm sure that if this does become a nuisance email clients and firewall programs may develope ways to control it.

There is one thing that can be done. You could send a reply telling the sender that if they continue to invade your privacy, you will no longer read their mail or perhaps add them to your block list. Of course this approach won't work on spam.

It really is similar to registered mail. I'd imagine that if someone kept endng me registered mail, I'd get to the point of refusing to sign.

I'm probably missing the point here but don't you have to install the program on http://www.msgtag.com/home/
(or similar) in order to be pestered?

Derek.W

"...don't you have to install the program... in order to be pestered?"

Probably not. I cannot be certain, but I suspect this program implements a dated spammer tactic of assigning HTML content to emails that sends GET requests upon being opened.

For example, if I send you a message with an HTML image tag that directs you to my site (www.mysite.com/some_image.jpg), your email client will probably automatically download it. Most email clients display the image automatically, just like browsing a webpage.

What is really happening is that the email client is sending a GET request to a server. This can of course be logged. What spammers do is attach a unique ASCII code to the GET URL (in my example the image's filename) and correlate this with the address to which the message was sent. So if I want to track you, I generate a unique ID and send that ID only to you, attached to an image (in this case). When your client opens/views the message, that GET request is sent with the unique ID to my server and I know you viewed it, when, with what client, at what IP address, and at what email address.

This can be done without images or with them hidden in an invisible frame. It's common to see an invisible iframe with a 1x1 blank gif. This is a different from the feature that allows a sender to be alerted. This cannot be done with just two users and their email program - it requires a web server. It also requires that the HTML be parsed.

There most certainly is a way to block this. Clients like Mozilla Thunderbird block external requests by default. You can also find the offending company's IP address or domain and block that. But the real answer is for the email clients to change their behavior.

Again, I can only *assume* this is what the service in question does. It's probably written as a COM+ object.

I do use Mailwasher Pro to preview all email before downloading POP3 mail or opening webmail. A feature of mailwasher is it automatically prevents these types of "Active" links from showing. so if it is a HTML "Get" type thing then I am shown the link data without actually getting the image or whatever. Mailwasher shows only the text of a message so I guess I'll continue to use it to read mail and only download any I want to keep.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him to fish and his wife will never forgive you.