au secours

[Peter Garrett]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2006 11:39:04 +1000
"Andre Mangan" <andremangan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2. Message Tag, to advise me when an email that I have sent has been
>    'opened' by the recipient.

Not to rain on your parade or anything .... but

1) The concept is dangerous: a spammer's dream - all a spammer has to do
is tag messages to be assured they have been read by the recipient,
assuming the recipient uses an html-enabled client because it

2) Doesn't work with non-html mail ( side note - yet another excellent
reason for using plain text only for mail)

Quote from mstag's  own website:
"Since the launch of MSGTAG, it has enjoyed a very high tag strike rate.
However, there are rare occasions when a tag will not be triggered. Some
email security products designed to filter out spam and viruses also
inadvertently block the tags produced by MSGTAG; [My comment: Notice the
misuse of the word "inadvertently" here]  and the forthcoming version of
Outlook (2003) will enable users to block external images, [My Comment:
Can you work out why? ]  thus allowing them to block MSGTAG's tags.
However, it’s likely that many users will not use this feature — and
MSGTAG will continue to work for non-Outlook recipients." [Translation: We
are banking on users continuing to be naive and unaware of what can be
done with remote html for tracking and information,  ]

There would be a reason why MS finally decided to block external images...
a cursory glance at any email security information source would explain
why ...

3) Is arguably a gross invasion of privacy

This isn't intended as an attack on you for liking the program :-)
 
I can understand why people like it. I just think using such a thing is ...
shall we say at best naive, at worst invasive.

Unfortunately I can't answer your other questions, so I hope you won't
consider me curmudgeonly for criticising this program....

Sincerely,

Peter