Interesting, I hope this gets tested in court as I’d like to know the outcome.
Since I can open an email without you knowing and I can load your tracker image without reading it, I don’t think it will stand up.
I think a more reliable method is a system that requires a user to do something to acknowledge and sign. I refinanced a mortgage recently and had something like this where the email just contained links that I had to log in, view, and accept. That seems a bit more reliable if I actually want to prove that someone was “served.”
It's been a very long time since I looked into it, but I do recall a court case that ruled delivering an invoice by email was considered the same as using the USPS.
The software just increments a counter when the invoice is opened and calls the url for the image. The image url is only used in the customer's email and it has a unique id. The url points to a server side perl script that associates the id with an invoice and increments a counter if some tests are successful.
So, while I'm sure one could probably figure out how to spoof the counter the process is obscure enough to make that improbable.
Since I can open an email without you knowing and I can load your tracker image without reading it, I don’t think it will stand up.
I think a more reliable method is a system that requires a user to do something to acknowledge and sign. I refinanced a mortgage recently and had something like this where the email just contained links that I had to log in, view, and accept. That seems a bit more reliable if I actually want to prove that someone was “served.”