Read Notify can track all your outgoing email or you can choose which ones you need to track. Read Notify will send you an instant message letting you know that your email is being read right now. You can also log in to track email sent and see which ones have bounced, which ones have been opened, and how many times the email has been opened.
How it will be helpful?
Useful to track the location and the time of opening and reading the mail and how many times the mail has been opened .How many times the mail has been forwarded and have an idea who reads the mail.
- Useful for the marketers /sale agents.
- To locate the geographical location of the readers
- Investigative journalism
- To do spy work.
We can interpret many data based on the read notify mail receipts. It has many features like notifying the PDF readers etc.
How it should work?
This is based on the input of a test conducted through a Gmail account.
- When we send an email to someone and want to get notified when it is opened, we add the domain name of our Email Reading Notification service to the receiver. (readnotify.com in our demonstration).
- When the email is sent it goes through the email server of the ERN service, so they add to it an image or more hosted on their web or ftp server for example.
- When we open the email, normally a request is sent to the web or ftp server that hosts the image added to the email. (Gmail -as we saw- protects its users by blocking the display of images by default!)
- With the request for the image goes lot of informations about the environment from which it was initiated and the ERN services take advantage of that to build their email tracking system.
Grey area:
Normally read notify mails usually will get past firewalls unless you are emailing to large companies. Some ISP's like Earthlink (spamblocker) will kick it out. Also Gmail will sometimes put it in the spam folder.
Over all it is a very useful utility and can be used judiciously.
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