Find out if someone reads your email
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 have added read notifications to the email because most email programs ask the user about those or simply ignore them right away. There is no sure way to receive notification at all if the recipient is cautious, most are not on the other hand and the following 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 can be hosted on websites where access to them can be tracked easily.
So, the trick is to add a graphic to the HTML email and check the stats to see if the image has been accessed on 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 read only the text and that HTML was disabled, or that the display of media was blocked by default.
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 1x1pixel 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.
Update: Another option would be to use an url shortener but that is only useful if the link is clicked on by the user. Many url shorteners provide you with statistics nowadays, Bitly does so for instance.
Note that many programs ask whether you want to load images from remote servers when you are reading emails.
Update 2: Spypig is no longer available. We have removed the link as a consequence.
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!