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John John
John John

Reputation: 4575

How to know that an email message was read?

I have a software that sends notifications, quotes and invoices to "clients of my clients" by email. Sometimes people don't answer it very fast, so someone needs to call by phone to confirm if they received and get the feedback. I would like to automate this, to know if them, at least, read the email. I know this is very difficult due to how email works, but some companies already try to do this in a satisfactory way, like:

In HTML mail messages we can create a resource that points to the server, like a image. But mail clients usually ask permission to the user to load the images. So, problem here.

But for text mail messages? Is there any way to know the email was read? How companies these companies do?

PS: I don't know what tags is the best to classify my answer, I shall appreciate any edit.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4292

Answers (2)

John John
John John

Reputation: 4575

There is no way to be 100% sure if a email was opened, because of its architecture. There are some techniques to do this, but it always depends of user actions and mail client configurations. But:

About opening tracking:

Opens are tracked by including a transparent .png file, which will only work if there is an HTML component to the email (i.e., text only emails will not track opens). You should note that many email service providers disable images by default, so this data will only show up if the recipient clicks on display images button in his/her email.

(Text extracted from mailgun.com user docs)

References:

Upvotes: 3

Jan Kundrát
Jan Kundrát

Reputation: 3816

As arnt says, you're fighting the design and basic operation of e-mail. Whenever you send a mail, there is a boundary between a MTA you control (or at least have an account on) and a MTA that is responsible for your target user's mail. What you can know is whether the user's MTA accepted the mail for delivery. Whatever happens afterwards is outside of your control.

Consider an example of a snail mail. When the package enters the recipient's box, you won't know whether they put the whole unopened envelope to a trash bin, or whether they opened is and read the contents very carefully. You can approximate that goal by using crude measures (like embedding a webcam-and-a-computer which will activate upon envelope opening and send you the snapshot of the face of the opener via a cell phone), but doing so is unreliable, unethical, and probably illegal in plenty of countries.

The "return receipts" or embedded image links are similar -- because the whole e-mail is already in the hands of the user's SW, they can do anything with it. A good MUA will probably ask before sending out dumb return receipts, and it also won't load remote images in HTML mail (because it's easy to create an http://trackme.example.org/mail/for/user/12345/message/666/image.png and have a database which says "hey, this URL belongs to Mr. Pichler, and is used in the first message we sent him). The most you can do is to ask nicely, and return receipts (RFC 3798) are a machine-readable way of doing just that.

Upvotes: 1

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