Is this comment about email in a report on the BBC website true in anyway?

"Invest in a spam filter. You shouldn't open a spam e-mail, because as soon as you open the e-mail up, it notifies the organisation that has sent that, saying this is a valid e-mail address. They know how long you've looked at it, when you looked at it and did you go back to it."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7281...

That would be if they put a cookie onto your computer that can sit there unnoticed gathering data and then that can be returned to the sender.

You should have software on your computer to delete cookies adn to keep it virus free and protected.

It depends on your mail server. Most by default do not allow cookies from email.

A lot of spam does come with an "alert when read" type thing - like the Read Receipt you have in outlook.

I very much doubt they can tell how long you looked at an email for, but they could see if you read it.

well if there is malicious code within the email it could be possible to do this so it may be true for a small minority of cases of for people who are not the birghtest bulbs in the box

It is half true.

Spam messages tend to include webbugs, which are images, but the images are not attached to the email, they are stored on a remote webserver.

When you open the email, the image is requested from the server and they can recognise that the email addressed to a particular address was the open that triggered the request (because they put a unique code on the end of the URL to the image).

HOWEVER, all good email clients (I seem to recall that that does not include Microsoft Outlook, but I could be wrong about that) will block remote images by default, you have to ask them to open the image explicitly.

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Marketing/web_...

I knew you could send an email with a 'notify when read' setting, can't see how someone can tell how long you've been reading an email??

This will mostly be to do with Microsoft Outlook, which in my opinion is the WORST email client in existence and should not be used by anyone. Get yourself Mozilla Thunderbird instead, it's infinitely better!

lots of legit companies...and others...use aweber.com which can tell you piles of details about the customer eg location, when the email was rcvd, read, how long for etc etc

Get Gmail it totally rocks as an email provider, and spam is just a thing of the past for me other than about one or two that get through next to the 100 or so every day that get blocked