Why DidTheyReadIt?

DidTheyReadIt: You Sent It, But Did They Read It?

The site proudly proclaims that it will revolutionize the way people would send and receive email. After reading what their technology can accomplish, I am thinking that the revolution is sure to happen, only in the negative sense.

In my org, we use Lotus Notes 7 as the corporate collaboration tool which obviously includes email. Now, there is a feature built into it called "Return Receipt". Opinions obviously differ, but I consider it as one of the most intrusive features that defeats the purpose of individual privacy. Any email sent by a sender with the RR on it smells of distrust. Like someone sends over an invisible sleuth with the email to check if the email was read by the recipient. Some people really love to set that flag on with their emails. There were those who were supportive of it as it provided them with tracking. What is the need I ask? Do you want to feel self-important and see if your emails were actually read or not?

RR's - accept it or not - are an intrusion into one's privacy. That I read sender's email or not is not the sender's business to know. If I do and if I have to respond, I will. If I do not want to read it because of multiple reasons that may apply, I will retain it till such a time that I find time to read it.

Now, it is going one step further. With the service from didtheyreadit.com, you can find out if your mail was read for 3min, 32secs by your recipient who was vacationing in Guatemala while claiming to be attending a business conference at Rio. Why the heck do they care? Is it not important enough that the email was read? Another lopsided view of the equation is that, the recipient would not know if the sender was himself vacationing in Guatemala while claiming to close a business deal in NYC. Why only the recipient? Let it be two sided. Let each other know where they were while doing their emails.

All in all, I sometimes find it exceedingly stupid for people to conjure of such ideas and then bring it live on internet for common use. This service is only useful for those who do not trust the people to whom they are sending their emails to. So much for a more liveable world, huh?