Email tracking impossible

[Eveline]

http://tafkac.org/ulz/emailtracking.html

EMAIL TRACKING NOT POSSIBLE

Is email tracking true?

No. It's impossible to track an email as it's forwarded.

These hoaxes seem to have hit the big time sometime around late 1997. The first version of the Bill Gates hoax was seen in November 1997. After a long gap the Disney version followed it sometime around August 1998. There have been two or three frequently-seen versions of this each year since 1998, each mentioning a different company and product.
Comments

The Internet email system works in a way which makes tracking email forwarding impossible. For one of the hoaxes to be true, internet email would have to do one of the following:

(a) All internet email, no matter what the starting and finishing points, would have to pass through (or at least be registered at) a central point.

(b) Your email software would have to somehow know the starting-point of every forwarding chain and send a message to it every time you forward that email.

The Internet is not built around a central computer: there's no 'hub' or 'centre of the net' which everything has to pass through. If someone in Florida sends email to someone else in Florida, that email may never go outside Florida. If someone in France emails someone in Germany, that email is unlikely to ever go near Florida. There can be no way to count how many times a message has moved from one person to another because there's no collection-point for traffic information.

Hundreds of people and companies have written email software. As long as the software conforms to the Internet standard it will be able to receive and send email. The standard does not mention any way of noting the origin of a message once it has been forwarded. If Alice sends an email to Bob, there's nothing she can put in her message to order Bob's software to tell her if Bob forwards her message. Even if the original message is sent using a special piece of software (as one of the Microsoft versions of this hoax suggests), there's no way of controlling what software Bob uses to read or send his email.

However, problems in recent releases of several popular email applications have created situations in which some email could conceivably be tracked. These problems have revolved around the use of the programming language Javascript in email. Javascript is typically used in Web pages, but some email application can read and perform Javascript programs included in email.

The increased implementation of email software which executes all JavaScript found in an incoming email has made a certain amount of email-tracking possible -- but only if the person receiving the email has JavaScript turned-on for incoming messages. Since JavaScript can be used to, for example, scan your mailbox or delete all your files anyone who has their email software set up this way is giving anyone who knows their email address a great deal of control over their computer.

A piece of JavaScript included in an email message could conceivably be used to send a message back to the originator of the message each time the message was read. If the message is forwarded then it's possible that the JavaScript will be forwarded with it. The vast majority of email software available, however, does not understand JavaScript and has not way of executing JavaScript found in an incoming message. The only systems which will be vulnerable to this attack are programs which include both web-browsing and email capabilities such as Outlook, Outlook Express and Netscape 6.

For more on the problems with Javascript in email, see the Privacy Foundation.

At the time of writing, the Urban Legend Zeitgeist are not aware of any email-tracking items which have actually used this technique to track email-forwarding. It is mentioned only for the sake of completeness.

[Eveline]

They forget the tracking malware which sends a signal to the original sender to validate your mail address.
If yoou forward the mail, a new signal from those receivers will be semt.
Even though they say many email programms don't handle scripts, too many still do.