Email read notification software???

georgiac

Hi, I am having a few problems with someone I do business with clain=ming they haven't received my emails.

Now, this may or may not be true but everyone else on the send to list received theirs.

A friend said there is some free software that acts as an email read notification service, emailling you back to say the email has been opened.

Please does anyone know what it is called and whether it is reliable and most importantly FREE!!!;)

Thanks

woo

If you both use outlook you can ask for a read receipt.
Outlook can also ask for a delivery receipt which will indicate if it has reached the recipients server, but both of these can be switched off.
I'm not aware of any that will guarantee notification.

hobo28

Unfortunately there's not much you can do. Internet e-mail was never designed to scale to this size.

As woo suggests, the only thing you can do is ask for a read receipt. The recipient if also using Outlook will get the opportunity to either send one or not. Its not automatic.

The way SMTP works is that if your mail was undelieverable, it would eventually come back to you. The fact you haven't had such a reply means its either been delivered or a spam filter has deleted it.

I would check to see if your customer is using a spam filter and see if your messages are trapped there.

f1charlie

I have been looking at this one which claims to send you notification automatically when the message is opened, without the reader having to do anything. I haven't tried it out as the free version doesn't work for multiple recipients, but it should do what you want if you send the message to the problem user separately:

http://www.msgtag.com/home/

Mrs_pbradley936

If the other person has AOL the spam filters are very strong and if I want to be sure to get mail I put the persons' details in my address book. The idea behind it is so that children do not get anything unsuitable but it can be a nuisance at times!

ukbill69

This is a feature in outlook, u should have it in outlook express, thats free on a windows xp machine.

sfry

I have been using Message Tag as recommended by a poster above for a couple of years and it works perfectly. The free version will tell the e-mail's recipient that the sender has been notified that the e-mail has been read. With the paid for version (which is only about £11 and a one-off fee) there is the option not to tell the recipient that the e-mail is being monitored. So if the recipient denies having read the e-mail you can tell them the exact time it has been delivered and opened.

georgiac

Thanks everyone, I think the software recommended by f1charlie and sfry should be perfect. For £11 it's a small price to pay for piece of mind.

Thanks again

irnbru_2

georgiac wrote:

A friend said there is some free software that acts as an email read notification service, emailling you back to say the email has been opened.

Reply to one of their messages in plain-text only.

Are you sending to an ISP address or a business address?

DrBenway

georgiac wrote:

Thanks everyone, I think the software recommended by f1charlie and sfry should be perfect. For £11 it's a small price to pay for piece of mind.

Thanks again

Dont go thinking this will definately work. You are paying £11 for something that may work.

It is trivial to prove that i can read an email sent with this software installed and you would know nothing about it.

Alfie_E

DrBenway wrote:

Dont go thinking this will definately work. You are paying £11 for something that may work.

Very true. From what I can gather from the web, it uses the same method spammers use, when they try to work out who’s read one of their emails – using a hidden image. For this reason, it’s a method that’s not terribly successful. It will fail if:

• The recipient reads emails only as plain text.
• The recipient’s email program blocks images, and the recipient doesn’t actively choose to look at the image(s) in your email. Outlook Express blocks by default. Although, I’ve noted that the replacement Live Mail desktop, by default, lets through images from addresses on a recipient’s contact list.
• The recipient’s computer, or proxy on their network, is set to block all data destined for computers on a list of suspect computers. I use this list of suspect sites, and I had to by pass it to even look at the MSGTAG website, so it’s not going to work for emails sent to me.

Also, you should consider carefully the legal implications of this, in relation to privacy. You need to accept that the protocols for email just don’t provide for what you want. If what you want to send is that important, you might want to consider signed-for post.