Someone is sending me scam emails trying to extort payment in Bitcoin, supposedly using my own Email address, stating that a timer is being started before further action is taken when I read the Email. Is this possible?
If there is no such thing as a “Read Receipt” in Mac Mail I can simply ignore the Emails. If not, I may have to take further action.
—–
Adrian Hayes
When you get an email, the "from" field can be anything. It is just like when you get a letter in the mail and someone can write anything they want in the return address in the corner. Spam will sometimes use your email address in the "from" to get you to notice the message, and scammers will often put your email address in "from" and say something ridiculous about sending the email from your account. It isn't being sent from your account, the "from" line is simply faked.
Those scam emails you are describing are sent to almost everyone. I get plenty of them, even to forwarding email addresses that aren't real mailboxes.
A "read receipt" is a way for the sender to know if you viewed the message. There is no universal system for read receipts built into email in general. But some messages will embed a small external web image in the message and then check to see if the image was "viewed."
But in this case it doesn't matter. These spam/scam emails don't care. They are just looking to send out millions and maybe get a handful that fall for it. They probably have no interest in which people viewed the messages. And if they did, what would it tell them? Most people view and email and then delete the junk. Knowing it was viewed doesn't help and I'm sure they don't want to invest in collecting analytics data to see how many people view their messages. That gets them nothing, really.
Just delete these and move on. There's no "further action" to take to mitigate the issue. Hopefully the email service you use is working hard to blacklist servers that send these out.
I would like to have a means of acknowledging the receipt of a note from a personal friend, an expected payment from a friend or respond to a bit of news from a family member without taking the time to write a formal written response that I might turn or off when I choose. Thanks, Travers Edwards
James: There's no way to do that with email. You can do it with some messaging systems, such as iMessage and some apps, but at least in the case of iMessage the recipient always has the option to turn it off. So if you see a "read" it has been read, but if you only see "delivered" then it may or may not have been read, you can't tell.