Track when an Email is read/opened

[johnsun1976]

Hi. I was doing some research programs that does link tracking and mail tracking. I seemed to have figured out how links in an email are tracked. They first send information to a server to record and then redirected to the actual site, but I was wondering how these program knows that the email have been download and viewed?
Thanks
John

 

[Provogeek]

You have the link idea down, thats how the spammers make money. They need to know you went to the advertised site, but they have no idea if you even opened the e-mail that got sent to you.

In outlook there is an option to send a read receipt. You can turn this on to place a command in your e-mail so that when another outlook client opens it, a read receipt is sent out to the sender. The outlook client also as the ability to NOT send or ASK to send a read receipt. I am not sure if other mail packages have this feature or can use outlook's feature. It is user defiend, you can use it, or not, your choice and no one can force you if you don't want to send out reciepts. So they can ask, but you can deny.

Out side of that, no matter how many e-mails you have seen about a reward for being a participent in an e-mail tracking test performed by Microsoft and Disney, it is currently not a technical feature of Internet e-mail to be tracked once it is transmited onto the Internet.

E-Mail tracking is only truely posible with an internal mail system like Exchange, GroupWise, and Notes. But once it's been sent out on the Internet, you can't retract, you can't verify delivery, you can't verify the message has been opened/read. Brent Schmidt CNE,Network +
Senior Network Engineer
Keep IT Simple

http://www.kiscc.com

 

[Davetoo]

Microsoft Outlook connected to an Exchange server and running in Corporate/Workgroup mode that permits acknowledgements does not provide for the individual user to not send a read receipt if one is requested (or a received receipt either).