The key word is reliable.
I have searched for things like “emails opened” and asked questions, but all that has been futile.
I am certain I am not the only person unable to find an answer to this problem.
There is no answer to this problem.
And you’re quite right — you’re not the only person wishing otherwise. As a result, many (many!) companies offer so-called email tracking services claiming to do it. The problem? They overpromise and underdeliver.
I’ll explain why.
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Did they read it?
There’s no 100% reliable way to know if an email has been opened or read. Read receipts and tracking images are blocked by most email programs due to spam and privacy concerns. If your business depends on confirmation, consider alternative communication methods like requiring recipients to visit a webpage.
Emails opened: the bottom line
I want to start by making this very clear: there is no 100% reliable way to tell with certainty that an email you sent has or has not been received, opened, or read.
None.
If your business relies on it, find different approaches to communicate with your clientele.
I get a lot of pushback when I make those statements, but that’s the way it is. No magic tool or technique can make it otherwise.
Why you can’t tell
There are a couple of reasons for this reality. You can choose one or the other depending on your level of cynicism.
- Email is broken.
- Your recipient’s right to privacy trumps your need to know.
We can argue about the first all you want; it’s the second statement that rules.
Spam made everyone realize just how important privacy is. Spam is the reason email programs disable the methods that can track email reception.
So you can blame spam, if you like, for making this impossible. Whether that’s part of “email is broken” or “right to privacy”, it is what it is, and at the risk of repeating myself, it means you cannot track with certainty whether a specific email has been opened or read.
Period.
Related
How Do I Get an Email Forward Notification When Someone Forwards My Message?
Several urban legends would have you believe that when you forward an email, it can somehow be tracked. It cannot. Period. I'll explain why that is.#11496
Traditional tracking methods
Traditionally, there have been two methods used to track what happens when we send an email.
1. Delivery and read receipts
The email protocol allows email messages to include a request for a delivery receipt and/or a read receipt.
- A delivery receipt is an email message automatically sent by the recipient’s email program when the email arrives.
- A read receipt is an email message automatically sent by the recipient’s email program when the email is opened.
Most email programs no longer respond to either and ignore them completely. You’ll get no notification even if you ask for one. At best, the program may ask the recipient whether to send the receipt. Most recipients, of course, say no.
The reason is, as you might have guessed, spam. Spammers try to use receipts to validate that they’re sending to a valid email address and thus should send even more. No one wants that, so the features are disabled by default.
2. Tracking images (or bugs)
Images can be included in HTML or rich-text email messages. Those images can be included with the message or can be fetched from some location on the internet to be displayed.
A good example is my newsletter. It includes at least two images: a logo at the top and my signature at the bottom. The images themselves are not included in the email. When you open an email with those images (and have image display enabled), your email program fetches them. It requests them from my web server — an action that my web server can log.
The request for an image can even be tailored to the specific email address it was sent to. For example, this is a link to an image.
https://askleo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/logo2019-2003.png
If it’s clicked on (or if it’s used in an email to display an image), I can tell that the image has been fetched. This might allow me to say “Ten thousand people fetched this image.”
This, on the other hand, tells me more.
https://askleo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/logo2019-2003.png?src=leo@askleo.com
This displays the same image, but the request includes additional information. It tells me that “leo@askleo.com” fetched it. (It doesn’t have to be quite as blatant as an obvious email address. Any kind of encoded information — in some cases even the name of the image being fetched — can be unique to each recipient.)
It sounds like a perfect tracking mechanism to determine whether a specific recipient has opened an email… so spammers started using it. If the image was fetched, the spammer knew they had reached a real person who looked at it and thus should send them more spam.
And that, in turn, is why email programs no longer display images by default. If image display is disabled, the entire approach to tracking via image references fails.
Email open tracking services
As I said, I get pushback from individuals or services who provide open and delivery tracking services, telling me that their service is special in that it works.
The techniques they use fall into two buckets.
- Image-open tracking, as I describe above, may work for many recipients, but it cannot be relied upon to work for every recipient. Even a single recipient who refuses to display images invalidates the claim.
- It’s not email. As I’ll describe in a moment, one technique is to move the message delivery away from the email infrastructure to a private message-delivery tool. Usually this forces the recipient to visit a specific website to get the message. This doesn’t track how many people got or opened the email; it only tracks the number of people willing to take the extra step to get the message.
Lack of data tells you nothing
Most companies offering to track email use image references. Since many people enable image display for emails from people they know and trust, it can still work. However:
- If an image is referenced, then the email was displayed. Success? Not really. Just because it was displayed on someone’s screen doesn’t mean that it was read. (They could just have been scrolling through quickly looking for something else, for example.)
- If an image was not referenced, the email may have been lost, ignored, or routed to a spam filter. Or it might have been read with image display turned off.
The technique is not 100% reliable.
Related
How Can Newsletter Senders Tell That I Haven’t Opened Their Newsletter?
It's impossible to truly determine if someone opened an email, but newsletters worrying about their reputation try to get an idea.#12232
Alternatives
The most common alternative boils down to using a private messaging system.
The technique works like this: you place your message on an online service — perhaps your own web server — and then email a link to the message instead of the message itself. In order to read your message, the recipient must click on the link and visit the web server holding the message. That visit can be logged.
An exchange server is another kind of private messaging system. People on an exchange server-based system sending to others on that same system (for instance, at a business) can get reliable notifications that the email has been read or opened.
But if the email message can simply be read on its own without requiring external resources — just by showing up in someone’s inbox — there’s no way to know with 100% certainty whether or not the message was delivered, opened, read, or ignored completely.
How open tracking can still be valuable
As I mentioned, I use open tracking on my newsletter. You’re probably wondering why I do so if it’s so unreliable.
To begin with, I don’t care about specific opens. For example, I don’t know with 100% certainty whether you’ve opened my newsletter.
What I care about is trends, and I don’t need 100% open tracking for that. If this week’s newsletter shows that 50% of my subscribers opened their newsletters (meaning my logo and/or signature were displayed), and next week that drops to 25%, I care about that. I care about that a lot.
To be extra clear, if it shows that 50% of recipients opened my newsletters, it does not mean that exactly 50% did so. Some may have opened the newsletter with images disabled and thus were not tracked. A 50% result means that at least 50% of my recipients opened the newsletters, and probably more that were untracked.
Open rates are great for this kind of trend analysis. Almost every newsletter you receive has some form of it enabled. Again, we’re not looking at you, specifically; we’re looking how our subscribers as a group are reacting to what we provide. A sudden drop in open rates can mean many things, ranging from uninteresting content to filters that have decided our email was spam.
What it means is that the email publisher needs to pay attention and address the issue. Hopefully, we learn what you find most engaging and what is more likely to be delivered to your inbox instead of your spam folder.
And that all leads to better newsletters for everyone. 🙂
Do this
If you need to know that specific emails have been open or read, email tracking is not the solution. You need to consider other alternatives.
If you care about trends, these techniques are a fine approach, particularly if you’re sending to an audience that inherently trusts you and is likely to display the images you include in your email.
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For those people who “blame” email for being so untrackable, remember that most paper mail doesn’t have reliable proof of reading, either. Yes you posted it, yes it was delivered, yes it was even signed for (by some illegible name) and even yes it was handed to the addressee. And she threw it straight in the bin because she didn’t realise how important it was, or it looked like junk mail. So the sender has “proof of delivery” but no-one read it! It’s not an email-specific problem.
And just like paper mail, you can REASONABLY rely on the fact that IN MOST NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES email IS delivered, and IS read. If it’s not deliverable you will be told. Yes, that system is probably not 100% good enough for military or even some business cases where it is really important but for most of our email it works. If you aren’t told anything to the contrary, it’s been delivered, and probably been read.
One big exception is when you’ve sent an email to someone for the first time, and you’re not in their contacts/address book, and their over-zealous (IMO) email system has intercepted it. BT/Yahoo does that. And many of their customers don’t know that the intercepted email is put in a junkmail or bulk mail folder that can only be seen via Webmail access, and these same customers don’t remember being told about that (they were) and/or don’t know how to get into webmail, or where to look find out how.
If Leo doesn’t agree with my general perceptions, I’m sure he’ll explain, below :o)
And if he says I’m wrong, I’ll believe him. :o)
30-Dec-2009
The Spam collection is the one most people never check or don’t even know it exists or how to get to it.
I have a friend that falls into the later category in spite of my attempts to train them.
There is another group: Those who intended to send email, sent it to an old email address, or forgot to hit send and left it sitting in the drafts folder.
The last of those is one I do occasionally.
Person from first paragraph had two of the other reasons recently. Two people were rather irate about them not responding to their emails. As tech support, I searched their gmail account (which never deletes anything) and there was no messages from either of the people relating to the “unreturned” ones. Both regularly send the person emails to the proper address but there would be a slim chance of them using an address that ended 4 1/2 years ago. My best guess is that they thought about sending it (but didn’t actually write it) or having a surprise coming when they have a reason to look in their drafts folder.
This is interesting. I have had a couple of times when signing up on a site or reseting a password, that the system sends an email request to verify its really me. After I reply, then it sends my needed info in a return email or lets me log on, etc. I.E. in their sent email include: please click on this link, follow instructions, etc. I would think this would be a way for this person to have some sort of verification if his/her email was verified it was received and read by someone wanting to read it… The idea is is you have to read the email to get the info you requested in the first place. What do you think leo?
30-Dec-2009
AOL has a ‘check status’ feature — but it works only with mail sent from one’s AOL account to another AOL account/email address.
My whole family and many friends are long time AOL users. The great “check status” feature works giving the actual time that the recipient open the sender’s email. How come this works only for AOL to AOL email?
It works because AOL controls the entire chain that the email uses. This is why it also works with Exchange servers for people inside a company.
Once it leaves AOL’s system, other systems (for reasons explained in the article) will usually NOT tell AOL that it was opened. I can imagine (because of the amount of spam that AOL allowed in the past) that other systems would really not want to give any indication back to AOL.
Because they’re in control of the entire path – or more importantly, both endpoints – and choose to make it work.
The comments here are kind of comical. It’s as if people didn’t even read the article. They saw what it was about and jumped right down to the comments section to endorse one system or another that claims to verify that an e-mail has been received and read, every one of those systems being an obvious variation on one of the two methods Leo wrote about above, stating very clearly why they’re not reliable.
Comical and frustrating. 🙁
Along with the theme of read receipts, it’s a shame that you can’t filter commenting to those who actually read the post.
In my 13 years of doing this, I have to agree. I’m often amazed.
Actually, there is a way. If a comment seems to indicate that the commenter hasn’t read the article, I trash it.
I’ve been using MailChimp for a year now to send mail to about 80 people I know. MailChimp offers extensive statistics including who opened it, clicked on it, etc.
I noticed a very small percentage of opens, so I asked those who showed as unopened whether they’d received the email. They said they’d read it.
My conclusion: many people read their mail in Preview mode. They rarely click on it to open it. I do this tooinOutlook 2013. Am I right that previewing an email does not count as an open?
That would depend on how each email program or email web interface handles it. And as Leo said, the verification methods often simply don’t work.
If images are not displayed then it’s not considered an “open” – preview mode or any other mode.
Is that a real poncho, or is that a Sear’s poncho. — F. Zappa
Message receipts is a Microsoft thing. There is a better email system than Exchange – Novell GroupWise. When you look at your sent items’ properties, you will see when your email is read and/or forwarded. This email system is much better than Exchange. They had this feature 15+ years ago. I doubt in my lifetime will Microsoft ever have these features built in.
And again, those features only work within the same ecosystem, regardless of what that might be.
My position on the possibilities has not changed. Email tracing is not 100% reliable.
I found an article about how to track gmail message status using google analytics at http://jnanweb.com/2016/04/02/gmail-message-status/
Google Analytics is the way to go!!
It may not be possible to tell for sure, but an idea just occurred to me. Write the message and convert it to a .jpg or .png file remotely linked to the email. That would increase the odds that the person has to open the image to view the email, and that would indicate they opened and likely read the email. Not a sure thing but it might help.
Leo
In the section on Open Tracking, you write:
“A sudden drop in open rates can mean many things, ranging from terribly uninteresting content to filters that have decided that email was spam.
What it does mean is that the sender needs to pay attention and address the issue.”
In view of this, it’s noteworthy that when I click to open the Ask Leo? messages, my email client (Thunderbird, which we both use) tells me that it thinks the message is a scam.
It has for years. More here: http://ask-leo.com/why_does_my_email_program_think_that_this_message_might_be_a_scam.html
I work for a company that uses a marketing service-something like Constant Contact, but for their type of industry-for sending out newsletters, communications etc. The service analytics reports shows what emails were opened and which ones weren’t (perhaps the same type of technology Leo was discussing about his newsletters?). While this solution is impractical/inappropriate for daily communications, there’s no rule stating you have to send only newsletters or promos-you can send any email out, to as many or as few as you wish, with any content. Depending on what you’re emailing, it may be useful for some…?
The service I use – aweber – does the same. But these figures are NOT 100% accurate. They reflect only those emails which were opened with images enabled, or had links clicked within them. If a person opens an email without images enabled, reads it, and then discards it, there is NO WAY TO KNOW. Period.
Saying that this method isn’t 100% accurate seems like that’s giving too much credit. Since all modern email programs and most webmail interfaces block pictures by default, the accuracy would seem to be much closer to 0% than 100%.
It … varies. There’s a reason that most commercial newsletters say “enable images for the best experience”. Yes, it’s a better experience for the reader, but it also enabled open tracking as a side effect. (And when clicks on links in an email are also tracked, that implies an open as well.)
There’s also a mail tracking tool not mentioned here – Deskun.com. I’ve discovered it recently when I was looking for a free alternative to mailtrack, because I need to track a lot of emails monthly. I must say it works fine for me. This extension doesn’t have read notifications yet, hope they’ll do it.
Read notifications are notoriously unreliable. The receiving email program usually has a way to turn those off, and most people do just that.
And by default, most email programs and webmail interfaces block downloading remote content which is how emails are tracked. So unless the receiver explicitly turns it on or clicks on a link, there is no way of knowing if the email was opened or viewed.
Put on email “Please acknowledge receipt.” Works great.
That is a good solution… just ask!
The Ask Leo! Confident Computing newsletter is full of links so even if a person enables remote images but doesn’t click any links, it’s probably safe to assume they opened it but didn’t read it.
Conversely, if they don’t enable images, but they DO click on a link, that, too, can be used to notice they’ve opened/read the newsletter.
I realize that, but what I said was if they have images enables and don’t click on any links, I’d doubt the did more than give the newsletter a glance.
I also wanted to point out that they are email tracking system services that you can use as well!
I would love to be notified whenever a message has been received and read myself!
Read the article, those are very unreliable.
And the whole point of this article is that those email tracking systems DO NOT work reliably.