Understanding Email Tracking

By Author: Groshan Fabiola
Total Articles: 2678
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Sometimes, you can spend lots of time wondering and even worrying about whether your email messages reached their intended recipients or were actually read. In an attempt to dispel this sort of doubt, many people use software that can get them an email return receipt, or delivery confirmation that their emails were read.

Basic Ways to Track Email

Certain email programs, such as Microsoft Outlook, provide basic features that specifically address the aspect of email confirmation. Usually, such email programs have options like "delivery confirmation", "return receipt", or "read receipt", which you can select before sending your email. If you check one of these options, each email you send will carry an email confirmation request attached to it.

Email delivery confirmation prompts the receiving machine to confirm email delivery by a return message. This response function is fully automated, requiring no effort from the addressee. The major downside to delivery confirmation is that it doesn’t tell you if the message gets read. Besides, sometimes the receiving email server may not be configured to respond to ...
... such requests at all. Think about it – most administrators are concerned with their customers, not with senders of email. It would be unlikely for them to waste system resources or bandwidth on delivery confirmation emails.

A read receipt request opens a window in the addressee’s email program every time they open their email. It notifies the addressee that you have requested a read receipt and lets them decide whether to give you one. This is important, as most email recipients consider these pop-ups annoying and disable them, rendering read receipt requests useless. In addition, if the email program installed on the recipient’s local machine does not support read receipts, that person won’t even receive your request. This is where third-party email tracking services come in.

Third-Party Email Tracking Programs

Third-party email tracking programs try to eliminate the issues of email confirmation in various ways. Most of them work by using a “web beacon” – a tiny 1x1-pixel image file referenced on the server of the email tracking service. When the addressee opens his or her email, the server retrieves a copy of the image, and that event notifies the email tracker that the targeted email was opened. However, the web beacon method isn’t 100% guaranteed to work.

For instance, if your addressee uses plain text format to read email instead of HTML, the email tracker can’t retrieve the web beacon image file. The web beacon won’t work if the addressee’s email program doesn’t automatically download image files in HTML mail, and the worst part is Microsoft Outlook and other popular email readers are configured by default to not download image files for security reasons.

Still, advanced email trackers using complex algorithms have success rates upwards to 98% in determining if your message has been read. The latest generation of programs is much more powerful than standard “return receipts”, and works regardless of the email program being used by the recipient. Such tools also work automatically, without alerting the recipient that the e-mail is being tracked.

For more resources about email tracking or about read receipt or even about track email, please review these links.