Tracking emails... true story

[DNQuest.com]

I the past year or so, I have always responded to the comments "just delete the email, no once can prove you got it" or something along those lines. My reply has always been "Emails can be tracked". Well, if you want a real life story, here it goes....

I was in court last week for a divorce. One of the problems is my estanged wife would always deny receiving emails and she would always send emails to her boyfriend. In court under cross examination, she denied receiving the emails, she strongly denied sending the emails to her boyfriend. I was able to present and have admitted into evidence the receipts of the emails I tracked showing when and where and what IP address used when she read the emails, also, it showed when they were forwarded to her boyfriend which tracked the same information previously stated.

Though her lawyer vehemently tried to challenge and refuse the admittance of the receipts, the judge overruled him stating that it was entered into evidence because of direct statements made by my wife and were not subjected to rules of discovery becuase they were only brought up to refute the wife's direct testimony.

Needless to say, I was able to discredit her pretty badly in court time after time and the tracked emails worked in my favor.

Now here is a funny story, I sent her an email this past Saturday, on Monday, she denied receiving the email, I sent her the receipt showing her reading it on Saturday... I laughed at her... she didn't respond back.

In conclusion, emails can be tracked, so don't think by just deleting them will get you off the hook.

[Dominata]

An sent email can only be tracked if the email client loads remote data (usually clear pixels) from your email server or client. Email clients can be configured to not load this data and will give the sender no data.
A lot of spam loads graphics from a remote server. This is so they know who opened their spam.

[DNQuest.com]

I have yet to not track an email and I have used many of them... but the point is... emails can be tracked and used if needed.

[tekz999]

Not plain text email.

[dtobias]

There are various "return-receipt-requested" schemes for plain-text mail that work on some mail programs, but can be disabled by the recipient. Since there are several different "standards" for this, a receipt request issued by one mail program might not be compatible with a recipient using a different program.

[Blarian]

Very awesome that it helped you in court.

Can this be done in programs like Mozilla Thunderbird? or a service like Gmail?

[DNQuest.com]

Yes, I use Thunderbird and it works, it works with return receipt off, it works with Spam Assasson on. I have not used it for a gmail account, but it works on email

[John-MI]

Nice to see they helped you out, though they are great for bussiness as will, as will as if some one steels your content i t tells you they read it and are just not listing to you, whihc i guess if you really wanted o you could sue.

- John

[MrDude]

When yahoo emailed me about an infringing domain they seemed to use readnotify.com service

[JuniperPark]

Not plain text email.

This is the correct answer.

If you have their computer and that save a copy of all emails in the outbox, that might be helpful, but that would be dumb on their part.

Even with tracking via graphic it can be sketchy, especially since you don't have to be connected to the internet to read email.