Tracking if emails are opened

plain text emails, can this be tracked?

[fom2001uk]

As I understand it, the number of opened emails is easy to track for HTML emails, but not for plain text.

Does anyone know of a way of recording opened text emails? I think is is a hugely important statistic.

[roitracker]

There is no way to track a text-only email open.

[paybacksa]

if your browser is set to send an acknowledgement/receipt than it it possible to track a plain text email.

[moltar]

But most of the time it will ask recepient if he/she wants to send a acknowledgement/receipt to the sender. At least outlook does that by default. And what about webmail?

[roitracker]

Read-receipts are a possibility, but I don't know *anyone* that has Outlook/OE set to send a read-receipt.

You'd also have to use a mailing programme that sends a read-receipt request along with your message, so it's pretty impractical if you're planning on sending to more than one recipient.

[fom2001uk]

In 2004, I find it astonishing that the technology doesn't exist to track an opened email :-(

[jomaxx]

Personally I find it astonishing anyone would open an email in anything but text mode.

[paybacksa]

I agree read receipts cannot be relied upon.

However, I always set "always request a receipt" and I get alot of acknowledgements. It is often telling to see who has their system set to auto-generate a receipt when requested (and no, the people are not generally aware they are doing so).

Firefox stores return receipts in the sent box, so they are blatantly obvious when they arrive.

[Receptional]

Want you CAN do though is ensure that you track people that click through to a web page by sending them through a unique landing page or tracking URL.

[phpacer]

I am not sure if this thread is still open.. I was looking up email tracking in google and found two companies that offer email tracking services. Besides tracking if the emails were opened, they offer tracking the duration of time emails were open for..

The services they offer are similar.. however, I am unable to figure out how they track the duration of time emails sent by you are open for. Any heads up on that would be awesome.

[edited by: webdiversity at 9:49 am (utc) on May 22, 2004]
[edit reason] URL's removed [/edit]

[webdiversity]

phpacer,

The original request was about text e-mails.

If you use rich HTML then you can gather so much more information.

Usually the way companies find out opening rates is by image requests/cookies, but in Outlook 2003 the default is to have remote image requests turned off, so even that is not as good as it used to be.

I've always been very straight. Open rates as a metric on their own are meaningless. If someone opens an e-mail and doesn't do what you wanted it's another failure. E-mail to action is the only metric that matters. If you sent 1000 e-mails 800 could have been zapped by spam filters, proxy servers, so it may be that only 200 ever saw the e-mail, regardless of format.

As Receptional said, use tracking URL's on your actions, whether it's text or html and use that as the measure. Sending text gives you more chance of the e-mail actually being read by the recipient. All the spammy e-mail is html and that is what the filters is trying to catch, much like dolphins in tuna nets.

[MarkHutch]

There is a company called "pointofmail" that offers a pretty decent way of getting a confirmation that an email has been read. I saw a news story about them on CNN today. However, I'm pretty sure it won't work unless it's allowed via the persons firewall. I haven't tested this one, but if you have to know if a message has been ready, this might be of interest to you. For their system to work, you MUST send the email via their system. The return address will show up as yours, but you must send via their servers. My guess is they place a code in the message that is sent to their servers.

There are going to be big privacy issues with this one. They are also letting customers know where in the country the message was read. I sure don't like that idea myself. Hopefully, a firewall will keep this thing from sending. Not sure if it will.