Gmail email opened notification

[dudleysesposa]

I like how you can set up Outlook to notify you as soon as the email you senthas been opened by the recipient. Can gmail be set up that way?

[Rufio]

From Google's help page:

"Read receipts are available only forGoogle Apps for Business, Education,and Government customers. They are notavailable in personal Gmail accounts."

[Simon H]

Yes you can, there is a browser extension called rightinbox that can track your Gmail

It works with Firefox and Chrome

here is the link http://www.rightinbox.com

This can actually work a lot better than the Outlook read receipt feature because Outlook relies on the recipient agreeing to the read receipt being sent to you. Many if not most people will have their email software set to ignore read receipts because of privacy concerns.

However there are still limitations with rightinbox which you should be aware of

Rightinbox tracks email by embedding an invisible image into the email which is downloaded from a remote server when the email is opened. When the image is downloaded you are alerted that the recipient has received / opened the email.

The problem with this is that spammers have been known to use exactly the same technique to confirm that someone is there when they send out junk emails. They will then send even more junk to that email address because they know someone is actually opening their emails.

Anyone wanting to avoid spammers tracking their email can set their software to only download images from contacts marked as trusted or to not download images at all. Unfortunately anyone doing this will also stop you tracking the emails you send to them.

Bottom line, there is no foolproof way to track that your emails have got to the recipient although IMO you will have more luck using rightinbox than the Outlook read receipt feature.