If you ever wondered whether mails you sent ever gets read or just sent to trash, you can use a mail tracking service like MailTracking.com which allows email tracking.
They send you a email notification whenever the recipient reads your email. Notification includes many details including following…
- Date and time opened
- Location of recipient (per their ISP city /town)
- How long the email was read for
- How many times your email was opened
- If your email was forwarded, or opened on a different compute
Now how to use this service in simplest way…
- Create an account with them first.
- Then next time, whenever you send mail to [email protected] just add .mailtracking.com to the email address. So in this case email address will become [email protected]
- Now whenever [email protected] read your email, you will receive notification mail from mailtracking.com
How it works… (Technical Details)
- Basically the change in email address will route email through mailtracking.com’ server.
- They add a small (around 3×3 pixel) white image which is almost invisible to human eyes in email body. The image will be hosted on mailtracking servers and a unique image is kept for each email message.
- So when someone opens email that image also get downloaded. Now mailtracking server logs the browser request for image (note that the request goes in background) and thus can mail you details which mentioned above.
Known Problem…
During testing I have noticed that top webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo etc doesn’t allow images to load by default for new email addresses. So if you are sending an email to [email protected], chance is that recipient will read your email message but without allowing images to load. In that case you will not get any notification.
Pay service…
MailTracking.com is not free. You can start with free account as I did. You get 25 credits (1 credit = 1 email) in free account. But if you really wants a service like this then consider using paid version as it they offers more feature and also a downloadable plugin which integrates with your browser. Otherwise there are many services like this you can switch to when you runs out of free credits! 😉
Thats All! Thanks Ankit for tip.
Links: MailTracking.com | ReadNotify.com (similar service)
10 Comments
Where will the email go? spam or inbox folder?
@Pavan
I get notification in my inbox but if you send mail to yourself (same account) it may go in spam as many email services mails with same email address in FROM & TO fields ad spam!
ufffff as i found this article on THIS SITE,, first i thought this is FREE service lol but then i read ur next paragraph and found,, just like http://www.didtheyreadit.com or like http://www.readnotify.com this IS ALSO PAID service 🙁 ….mmmm grrrrrr why they ask for money when basic mail is free and also why bigg giants like gmail yahoo dont provide this (ofcourse free ! lol)
ok
i got one thought now !
listen ha ….
its ok from ur tip that we can shift to other service providers when our credits run out… orrrrr we can use same service with different accounts orrrrrr we can use even same account with yahoo’s disposable e mail ids 😉 now i am going to try it…. but best thing would be such service FREE for us ! lol greedy adi 😉
ok…im here again …a sad news for all of us who r interested to use this service of e mail tracking 🙁 first thing is that it is nowhere free…. ok we will talk about this after i end my credits at all 3 known sites (didtheyreadit.com,,readnotify.com,,mailtracking.com) so thats to be discussed later…
now i came with problem ,, when i registered at didtheyreadit and sent my first ever tracking enabled e mail to my own gmail account…sent it from yahoo account… but as feared by blog writer,, it is blocking images 🙁 so though i read it it is not informing me at my yahoo account 🙁 any idea guys how to solve this basic problem??? we cant insist reciever to enable his images…
ok this i experienced with g mail…which even experienced by blog writer…. but i see,, when i opened their welcoming mail recieved at yahoo,, next moment they sent me email saying u just have opened our email lol also in yahoo i didnt found any option to disable or enable images… im using classsic mail of yahoo… will images get blocked if reciever using new yahoo mail interface??? if so,, then how to know which mail interface of yahoo our reciever using??? and any reports from rediff users??? or i will have to register at there for checking… rediff also blocks images??? uffffff pls help me how to overcome this ??? i see uploaded image gmail shows…. but not image from email server 🙁 pls help me ! thanks in advane !
@adi
First I don’t use rediffmail so no can’t give any info about it.
Next in Yahoo image blocking happens in new yahoo mail beta only. I don’t think we can know if a yahoo user is using classic mail or new yahoo mail.
In Gmail, image blocking is performed by default for each new email address unless and until user explicitly click on link shown in mail saying “Always display from images [email protected]“….
hello all 🙂 i am really interested in service like this …i registered in did they read it but found its not effective 🙁 (none of e mail tracking service is upto the mark and FOOLPROOF 🙁 ) SO i wrote e mail to mailto:[email protected] and so nice of them 🙂 the replied nicely to me… 🙂 here i post what i wrote and what i got as reply 🙂 hope u will find it usefull …
On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 10:36:50 -0700, adi wrote:
> hello
> i tried ur service for e mail tracking. but i noticed ur tracking
doesnt work with e mail providers such as gmail or yahoo with new
interface (it works with yahoo classic only) i noticed ur service works only
if the reader opts to show images in message which i send . but i cant
insist my reader to turn on their images …. so is your method
effective ??? nowadays almost all leading e mail providers block images by
default and user has to manually opt if he/she wants to see images or not.
this is true for all browsers. …. so kindly tell solution for a SURE
e mail tracking
>
>
> thanks
> -adi
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:22:54 -0700
From: “DidTheyReadIt Support”
Subject: [DidTheyReadIt #KNV-14059-822]: is this method effective ????
To: adi
Hello Adi,
Gmail has recently made some changes to their service which as effected
tracking to gmail recipients. We are working on a way around this
now, but don’t know how long that will take I’m sorry.
Tracking to Yahoo beta and classic both work fine. Note that you
cannot track to yourself or back to the same computer though (we do mention
this).
Sincerely,
someone
DidTheyReadIt Support
@Adi
Thanks for sharing this info adi… 🙂
I think email tracking is well known technique now a days, even individuals have started making scripts that can track emails. I just found a similar website which does not belong to any professional organization http://www.epagecollection.com/ and also free.
You can also try this free website http://www.getnotify.com. Its really a good one with very good success rate
MailTracking also offers an easy to use document tracking service for your MS Word / Excel / PowerPoint, Adobe PDF documents, and other OLE documents. I’ve tried their free version and i have a review article about it on my blog…