What exactly is "read notify" paid subscription service regarding email and such?

Question

Can someone explain the purpose of this subscription service and what it is used for and how it supposedly "tracks" emails and their locations of them being sent? Thanks!

Answer 1

'read notify' means that you'll be notified by email when the recipient(s) reads your email(s) - in practice though this only works well under ideal circumstances.

they work by sending a 'request read receipt' flag with the email, so that when the email is opened by the recipient the email server of the recipient will send an email back to you to let you know the email has been opened:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_receipt#Read-receipts

other methods involve embedding an object from a website into the email, meaning when the email is opened the object has been 'viewed' by the recipient of the email and then all kinds of personal information can be logged by the webserver that is storing the object when the object is 'viewed'.

tracking the location of computers and people on the internet is called geolocation, and uses maps with ip addresses to give a rough physical location of an online computer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolocation

all of the above can be done for free, and are rarely worth paying for outside of the marketing industry (ie. spam).