Duly dispatched and deleted. Tracking images like in this spam validate certain servers to be kosher in the eyes of google & co. Its sort of saying: 'hey look people on FT link to this site, so it must be good' or 'people are directing traffic to this domain'.

What it also could be is that its a web-bug, pulling some data from your web-browser as you open that page its posted in. Depending on how well FT is coded, it can pull content of cookies, ie User Name and then combine it with your current IP address etc.