I think we all have faced a situation before where we wanted to know if an email was read by a recipient. Did he / she receive the mail, was the email read ? You can’t know for sure even if you added read / write notifications to the email because most email programs ask the user about those. There is no sure way to notification at all if the recipient is cautious, most are not on the other hand and these tricks will work most of the time.
This only works with HTML emails and not with basic plain TXT emails. The recipient has to be able to receive and display html emails. Html emails can contain elements besides text, graphics for example. Graphics are hosted on websites who track access to these elements.
So, the trick is to add a graphic to the html email and check the stats to see if the graphic has been accessed from the server. If it was accessed the email was read. If it was not it either means that the email was not read or that the recipient reads only the text and has html disabled.
If you do not have a website you can use a service like Spypig or Statcounter and add those elements to your emails. Spypig is free which is great but it adds that silly pig image to the email and recipients with just a little common sense will be able to check on that and find out what you have been doing. Would not recommend this.
Statcounter is better because an invisible 1×1pixel image is added to the email, still if someone knows what to do they can see why the image was added.
The last method needs a website and access to a statistics script. Google Analytics is fine for example. What you do is you add a harmless image to the email, make it part of your signature for instance. Make sure no one else accesses that image and that it is unique for every email that you send and want to track.
This makes it less obvious that you want to track if the email was read or not and should be the preferred way. Still, if you do not have a website you might want to try one of the other two possibilities.
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11 Responses to “Find out if someone read your email”
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[...] 原文链接。 This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 11:22 pm and is filed under network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]
Unless embedded images are disabled that is.
Gmail will, by default disable any images within an email unless the reader specifically allows them. I’m pretty sure that this is a feature of most mail providers and email clients.
It’s how spammers are able to tell that you’re a real person behind your email address. So it’s a security feature to block as much “tracking” as possible.
If you get a confirmation, then you know it’s opened, but I’ve read that with these sorts of methods, you only see about a 10% accuracy (most being opened, and never actually reported).
http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=10352.25
AFAIK Mozilla Thunderbird also blocks automatic image loading.
IMO, this is a stupid idea and I don’t like it. I lose respect for people who use these services or try this trick.
btw: Outlook also blocks this unless I trust the user.
I would suggest to actually call the person with a good old fashioned phone call or skype even.
SpyPig actually allows you to use a blank white image that makes the tracking invisible or at lease less obvious to email recipients.
Users are not required to use one of the “silly” pig images as your review incorrectly mentions.
Thanks,
chris
http://www.SpyPig.com
AOL allows the sender to see if the e-mail was read… why do I have to downoad a separate software to see if someone with YAHOO has received and read my mail?
You can also use http://www.getnotify.com. Its more than just an email tracking service.
i whant to read my e-mail