Can Streak really track if Gmail emails are read?

The service Streak has been making the rounds lately. It is more or less an addon for Gmail that improves Google's mail service significantly in many ways.
You can create so called pipelines that help you manage certain work flows. Streak ships with a selection of business and personal pipelines that you can start with right away.
Each pipeline adds a number of boxes to Gmail that you use to organize emails. The Journalism pipeline for instance uses the following boxes: idea, researching, drafted, edited and published.
Sales and CRM on the other hand use other boxes, including lead, pitched, demo or closed - won.
Streak for Gmail

You can add and edit boxes as you see fit so that they are optimized for your own workflow. Pipelines for bug tracking, email support, product development or event planning are also available among others.
It seems to be an excellent tool if you use Gmail as your main inbox for all things email, and I'm considering using it for the website monitoring service that is about to be launched.
Email Tracking

One feature in particular has received quite the press: email tracking. When you compose your first email after the installation of Streak, you will be asked if you want to enable email tracking. You can do so right away, or use the custom icon that Streak displays on the compose screen to enable or disable tracking individually instead.
When you hit the send button with tracking enabled, a tracking sidebar widget is automatically added to the email so that you can monitor the progress.
If an email has been viewed by at least one recipient, you will also see an eye-icon in the list of emails which acts as an indicator.

So how does that tracking work?

That's easily explained by taking a look at the source code of the emails that use tracking. When you do so, you will find remote content in the source.
Whenever a user opens the email without proper protection, the remote content is loaded which is counted as a hit by software running on that server.
Once a hit has been recorded, Streak marks the email as viewed by a recipient.
Protection?
If you do not allow remote content to be displayed automatically, then you are save from being tracked. If you are using Thunderbird, you are automatically protected from this as remote content is automatically blocked by the email client.
You do get an option to display remote items though, and when you do, the remote contents is loaded and the view count is increased in Streak.
Other email clients may have similar means of protection.
Closing Words
It is safe to say that the tracking will work quite well most of the time, especially if a user is using web mail and not an email program like Thunderbird that takes care of these things automatically.
It is good to know though that Streak's email tracking feature uses the same technique that we have seen for ages.






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!