This is a whoosh, right? Email doesn’t work that way unless someone has done something very specific to make it work that way. Spammers don’t. Besides, spammers usually go to some trouble to hide where their spam is coming from. (A human can puzzle it out, but it takes a human’s brains and software can’t do it near reliably.)
No, email can be made to work that way. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I’m very sure it can be done.
Because the legitimate commercial company that does this service for my organization does this – they provide a report after each emailed newsletter telling how many emails bounced, how many arrived but were deleted without being opened, and how many were actually opened (and presumably read) by the recipients.
I believe it’s done by including in the body of the email links to a tiny, 1-pixel (thus invisible on screen) graphic hosted on the senders server – a different one for each recipient. When the email is opened, the emailreader retrieves that graphic, and their server records that it was accessed, therefore they can conclude that this particular recipient actually opened the email, and can record that fact. (Presumably text-only email readers, like some of our blind members use, would not show up on this. But maybe they are too few in number to affect the totals much.)
This would involve a fair amount of effort: each email would have to be customized with it’s own hidden graphic, and the server would have to keep track of which ones were accessed and associate that back to the email address. But all of this can be automated. And given what we hear about the profits to be made from spam emails, presumably it’s worthwhile for some of them to go to this effort.
This is true, but it’s also too late for the OP. Once they read the email, it’s all over. I don’t think there is any way for the sender to tell if I’ve deleted it from my machine, or the server.
Reread my post.
Spammers do this, but it doesn’t say whether an email was deleted. It just says whether or not the image was grabbed, which is why smart people set up their email software to never load images unless explicitly instructed to.
The assassination spam scam has been around for many years.
If you want to locate the sender’s country of origin, try displaying the headers and go here to see who the IP address is registered to. Note though that certain satellite-based ISPs in the Netherlands serve parts of Africa.
You could also send a copy to this guy who collects examples of such email.