A new service called DidTheyReadIt.com (I’m not going to link to them because they’re sleazy) offers to let you spy on the email-reading habits of those you send messages to. Ars has the lowdown:

For $50 a year, you send all of your e-mail messages as normal, but you tag .didtheyreadit.com to the end of every address. This forwards your mail through their servers, and then on to the recipient. It involves embedding a very small image into your e-mail, and then it relies on the recipient’s e-mail client to try and “load” that image, giving you the time it was viewed, an IP with which you can try and geo-locate (horribly inaccurate), and a refresh setting which will try to measure how long the message was open for. The end result is that this will not work in any text e-mail client, any e-mail client set to not display HTML email, and any client (such as Outlook 2003) set to not display non-embedded images by default.

As the Ars article points out, notwithstanding the breathless coverage in the mainstream press, this is neither particularly new or innovative. Nor is it likely to work very well. I read my email using two different programs at different times: a text-based client called Pine, and Apple’s Mail client for Mac OS X. The former can’t display images at all, and the latter I have set not to load images by default. That means that this “service” will fail completely if anyone tries to use it on me.

This is, however, yet another argument against one of the great evils of modern times: HTML-formatted email. As far as I’m concerned, there are almost no good reasons to embed graphics and formatted text in email messages. Email is designed to be a low-overhead, text-based medium. Sending in HTML format wastes bandwidth, increases the complexity of mail clients, and makes it more likely that messages will display differently on different email clients.

The fundamental problem with HTML-formatted email though, aside from annoying tricks like DidTheReadIt, is that it reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of email messages. Graphics are eye-catching, so if they are available, there’s a competitive advantage for those who use them. Many non-geeky people will perceive them as “more professional.” (My own employer has succumbed to this pressure.) On the other hand, embedded images and text formatting almost never add any useful information to the text of an email message. In this case, a picture is not worth a thousand words. So HTML-formatting makes email as a medium less useful overall, but a competitive equilibrium is for lots of people to use it. (I should clarify that sending pictures as attachments isn’t necessarily evil. I’m talking about the increasingly common practice of adding decorative graphical elements to make email messages look like web pages.)

So: if you need to send formatted text, send it as an attachment, or put it on the web and send the URL to your recipient. Set your email client to send messages in plain text. (I’ll be happy to tell you how to do this if you can’t figure it out) 99.9% of the time, if you can’t say it in plain text, the problem is with your writing skills, not the lack of pretty pictures.

And for God’s sake, if you use a real email client (as opposed to a web-based email service like HotMail) set it to not load images by default. It’s a standard feature of all good email clients. Not only will you waste a lot less bandwidth downloading porn spam pictures and thwart sleazy tracking services, but you’ll help drive the equilibrium back in the direction of efficient communication. There was a time when sending HTML-formatted email was the mark of a clueless internet newbie. I’m doing what I can to help make that norm return.