Unfortunately things aren't "getting" a bit creepy, they've been creepy for quite some time.
In 1998 I worked at a large publicly traded insurance company. We provided quotes online and sent a follow-up email to the person with their written quote in it. I was asked to figure out a way to determine when the person read their email. Our infrastructure was Classic ASP so I:
1. Created a new web site in IIS
2. Changed IIS' processing of .jpg to run through the ASP processor
3. Created a .jpg program in the site that would update a quote's record as having read the email
4. Put an img tag in the HTML email that loaded the "jpg" file with the unique identifier on a querystring
Our business people used this to automatically initiate an outbound call to the person the second they read the email. A lot of people were creeped out, "OMG I just sat down to read your email, what a weird coincidence" but by god those people bought insurance from us.
Of course today, that is the reason why images don't automatically load in emails. But there are plenty of people finding new creepy things to do every day.
Why did you need to map .jpg to ASP ISAPI filter? Why not just call someimage.asp and set the mime type and use BinaryWrite?
BTW, great conversion technique. Certainly something to do nowadays too, if you can get them to load an image or click a link. I wonder, do average people load images in emails or click the links "if this email does not render correctly"?
I feared some mail programs might filter out non-standard file extensions loading from an img tag. Probably paranoid but it was so easy to run .jpg through the ISAPI filter of a single site that it seemed prudent to do that.
The vast majority of our traffic was done by people while they were at work. It was actually pretty funny how most of our traffic came in on Monday mornings and then went down from there and then the weekends were unbelievably dead.
Beyond that, 1998 wasn't exactly the dark ages. I knew plenty of people that had cable modems in 1996. I had an ISDN line myself in 1996 and a DSL line in either 1998 or 1999. There were plenty of options for people back then that didn't live in the middle of nowhere. And call waiting took care of letting calls through unless the person explicitly disabled it. Heck, any time I had dialup I had two or more phone lines and I had a cell phone since 1994.
But you're right - like all solutions it wasn't 100% perfect but it sure helped tremendously.
I had a cable modem by 1998. Faster uplink speed than I have now, actually – saturated the 10MBps network in my house and it wasn't throttled in the pre-Napster, pre-port-filtered era.
10Mbs, not 100. With Cox in San Diego could hit (IIRC) 16 Mbps per cable segment but at the time no cable modem had a 100Mb ethernet interface since that hardware was still expensive.
In 1998 I worked at a large publicly traded insurance company. We provided quotes online and sent a follow-up email to the person with their written quote in it. I was asked to figure out a way to determine when the person read their email. Our infrastructure was Classic ASP so I:
1. Created a new web site in IIS
2. Changed IIS' processing of .jpg to run through the ASP processor
3. Created a .jpg program in the site that would update a quote's record as having read the email
4. Put an img tag in the HTML email that loaded the "jpg" file with the unique identifier on a querystring
Our business people used this to automatically initiate an outbound call to the person the second they read the email. A lot of people were creeped out, "OMG I just sat down to read your email, what a weird coincidence" but by god those people bought insurance from us.
Of course today, that is the reason why images don't automatically load in emails. But there are plenty of people finding new creepy things to do every day.