I sent a greeting card from a small commercial Flash card-maker to a number of people.
How? By entering the email addresses of your friends onto the card-maker's website? If so, you should know that many of the sites that offer these kinds of services are, in reality, collecting addresses to sell to spammers.
The service automatically notified me when each card arrived on the recipient's desktop.
If the cards were sent by email, they arrive in the recipients' mail in-boxes, not on the desktop, right?
How did it do this? Does that mean that when the email is opened, that it somehow dispatches a notice back to the original sender?
Under certain circumstances, and if the email contains a "web bug", a website can be notified such that the log for the site will record the action of viewing the email.
If so, then surely spammers use this to certify when they have reached a live sucker?
Some spam does make use of web bugs, so that if the spam email is opened while the recipient is online, a signal will be sent to a website.
Here's a cut'n'paste from info I have saved: _________________________________________________________
If the message contains webbugs _and_ the message is opened or previewed such that the HTML is retrieved, the spammer's server logs will contain entries that can be used to verify that the address is valid and that the mail was opened.
_________________________________________________________
And if they can do that, surely it's possible to trace that subtle little dispatched notice, which MUST go to a real address?
No, the "subtle little dispatched notice" that tells a spammer that an email has been viewed is not in the form of email that is sent to a spammer's address.
Info about web bugs here:
<http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid26_gci341290,00.html>:
"Web bug, also known as a Web beacon, is a file object (usually a graphic image such as a transparent GIF ) that is placed on a Web page or in an e-mail message to monitor user behavior, functioning as a kind of spyware."
Something you should know about spam, Don. Maybe as much as 60-70% of spam is now being sent from the computers of "innocent" third parties. These are (mostly) Windows boxes that were compromised by the various "backdoor trojan" viruses that were released this past summer. The spammers now have "remote control" of millions of these infected machines, and are using them to send. It's spamming by proxy, the current strategy. So, what a spammer's email address is, is not terribly relevant, these days.
Mary
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