Emails

[Jerry Bruette]

If I send an email using Gmail is there a way to know if the email was opened and read?

[Brian Tymchak]

Google "how to set up read receipts in Gmail". I think read receipts are not enabled for regular non-business gmail. However, I've seen 3rd party apps that claim to do this. I have no experience with them.

[Bill Howatt]

I think read receipts may also depend on the features and settings of the recipients email client. If it doesn't tell the sending email program that it was opened and read, it has no way of knowing. In my Outlook client I can have "Always", "Never", "Ask" set for responding to read receipt requests.

[Jim Becker]

Read receipts are also easily defeated...not really a sure and accurate thing.

[roger wiegand]

I ask the recipient to respond and let me know that they got it when it's important for me to know. There is no way to know if an email was read even if it was opened.

[Jerry Bruette]

I'm emailing someone at a large international corporation and I'm not sure if they're receiving my message or not. It's possible the message isn't reaching the recipient or they may be ignoring me.

Thought there might be a way for me to know if the email is being opened.

[Jim Becker]

A lot of corporate email systems actually do not permit "read receipts", at least to external sources, and even when they do, it's not reliable. Some email clients permit the end user to bypass the receipt process, too.

[Dan Friedrichs]

If there were a way to tell if you were reaching the right person at a large corporation, there would be a billion dollar market for that technology in B2B sales...

Aside from read receipts, there is actually another way to tell if an email is read: embed a link to a picture, and have that picture's URL be unique to the recipient. Then, when the email loads and the picture is retrieved, the sender knows you've opened the email and at what date/time. Also, if you forward it to someone else, they know that (number of retrievals goes up) and might even be able to see who the forwarded recipients are (IP address). You can imagine that could be useful/nefarious for all sorts of reasons. This is part of the reason that Outlook (etc) asks you to "show blocked content" before auto-opening pictures in email messages.

[Jim Becker]

Dan, that technique is sometimes called using "beacons" which are often "one pixel" images and not even visible to normal folks. As you note, sometimes the email client is setup to warn about loading external images, but that's not always the case.

[Dick Strauss]

Turning off auto-load images in some email clients defeats the beacons and allows you to read the email.