Mail mail how to find out that a letter has been read. How do I know if my message was received? How to hide that you read someone else's letter

Ivan Ivanichev

Perhaps everyone - at least once in their life - wanted to know whether the letter had been read. Typical situations:

• We responded to an interesting vacancy. We sent a resume, portfolio and cover letter, and received silence in response. Complete uncertainty.
• Participate in a creative competition. The deadlines are running out and the winner will be determined soon. At the same time, it is generally unclear whether they looked at your work or not.
• Sent price list/media kit by e-mail. Do you want to call your potential client soon after he reads the sales proposal? You don't know when this will happen.

A read receipt is not an option: the user can refuse to send a confirmation, read the letter and not respond.

Email marketing services and postmasters, of course, will provide the necessary statistics, but they are only relevant for mass mailing from your own domain. The average user does not need all this.

Thus, there are two ways to find out whether a letter has been read in Yandex / Mail.Ru / Gmail mail.

1. Use ready-made solutions: special services and extensions

There are a number of services and browser extensions that allow you to track whether the recipient has opened your letter. This is the easiest way, but unfortunately:

• Many free products are outdated/not working correctly.
• You have to pay for modern and convenient solutions, otherwise there will be restrictions and advertising.

I studied three different email tracking tools. Among them:

• GetNotify, which hasn't been updated since 2012.

How it works: to find out if a letter has been read, you need to send it to an address like [email protected]. The service then apparently adds hidden code to the content and forwards the email directly to the recipient - [email protected]. When the recipient opens it, the sender receives a notification by email.

Everything would be fine, but there is a problem with the encoding, and the postal service is complaining.

(paid or free), or you can attach an event to each letter and watch the report in Google Analytics. It is clear that this is not an option for everyone - rather, for maniacs and convinced web analysts. To do this, go to Gmail and write someone a letter (with pictures, text formatting, hyperlinks and whatever else you need). We save the letter in drafts and go to this document in Google Docs. The document will offer to save a copy - agree. Select “Email Tracker” from the menu and then “Initialize”. Verify your connection with Gmail - this is a one-time operation and will allow you to send emails directly from Google Docs.

After that, go to Send Email and select the desired draft according to the subject of the letter, adding your Google Analytics profile ID to it*. Click "Send Mail".

In fact, the script adds a microscopic transparent “picture”, 1*1 pixel in size, to your letter. The recipient will not see it. Yes and you too :)

When the recipient opens the letter, the script will process this event and count the “visit”. Considering that you can watch web analytics system reports in real time, you can watch this thing “with special effects” :)

How to view the desired report in Google Analytics?

Important clarification: all this will work if the recipient turns on the display of pictures in the received letter.

Open the web analytics system and select “events” in the “Standard reports” menu. This is where your Email Open category and events for it will be. The email addresses of your recipients, subject lines and other statistics will be displayed.

*Google Analytics tracking identifier (ID) looks like this: UA-xxxx-yy. You can easily find it in the web analytics system (Administrator -> select a specific view (project) -> Resource Settings and look at the Tracking ID there)

There's an even easier way to check if the recipient has read your email: use link shorteners like goo.gl or bit.ly, and then check if they clicked on those links.

When creating a newsletter for my company, I was concerned about whether my subscribers read the emails. You can’t put a counter on an email, you can’t execute any scripts, so you need to look for a way out. The simplest way is to ask the user to follow a link - for obvious reasons this may not work. The “unsubscribe” link will work if the user is not interested, i.e. we get information that is not exactly what we need. The exit suggested itself.

If the letter uses any elements from your site, then you just need to count the number of downloads. Email clients are very primitive and you can only count on downloading images. Therefore, we make a script that produces a simple white picture:

We check that the image is indeed being generated. However, now you need to determine whether the visitor is unique. A simple way is to tag your email like this:

where is the subscriber’s unique identifier (MD5 hash of the email). We embed it in the html page, check it in the browser - it is displayed. Now let's write the statistics to the database:

Now, every time a picture is downloaded in the database, the number of downloads for a given identifier increases. We generate a letter and send it for verification. And then it turns out that Gmail simply ignores such images. We need some way to interpret standard links to images as calls to a script. Of course, you can make a bunch of scripts, but this is not rational.

mod_rewrite for apache comes to the rescue. To recognize a link to a picture and replace it with a link to a script, you need to create a file like this in the script directory:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ([[:alnum:]]+).png$ img.php?i=$1 [L]
The first instruction is to enable mod_rewrite, the second is to use a regular expression to extract the name of the png file from the link, without the extension. Name may

• consist of numbers and letters: [:alnum:]
• have any number of them: [[:alnum:]]+
• remember the name: ([[:alnum:]]+)
• the end extension will be.png: ([[:alnum:]]+).png

After the space, we indicate what we should receive in return for what was found: img.php?i=$1 [L], where $1 is what we previously remembered in brackets, and [L] is an instruction instructing us to stop processing the URL during this operation. Let's combine everything into one script:

Now you can insert images into letters in the usual way:

mod_rewrite will change the link itself and transfer control to our script. At least Gmail, Outlook, and even OpenOffice Writer correctly recognized and displayed the image, and the read counter incremented properly.

The described method can be used almost everywhere where you need to count the number of openings of html structures, because images are supported almost everywhere.

Or a message in the messenger, and then, having not received a response, you begin to wonder whether it was received? In some cases this can actually be verified, depending on the way the message was sent.

You will need

• -mobile phone;
• -Internet.

Instructions

If you send a message from your phone, then you can know for sure that it was delivered. To do this, you need to set up a delivery report. The report comes in the form of a message indicating whether your message was received or whether it is on hold. The latter means that the recipient's phone is turned off or is out of range. The message is stored by the operator for three days; if the phone is not turned on during this time, it will be lost. So, let’s set up the report: go to “Messages”, select “Message Settings”. In some models, SMS settings are a separate item - this is what is needed. In this menu, go to “Send Settings” (it may be called differently, for example, “Send Profile”), in it, instead of the default settings, select “Send Report”. If we are talking about a messenger, then some of them, for example, Skype, display a message stating that the delivery was not carried out. This happens if the recipient is offline. ICQ often does not display any messages. In this case, you need to understand that sending can be carried out through the server, and, most likely, as soon as the user logs into the messenger, the message will be received. But since instant messengers work through a less reliable delivery channel than, for example, mail, the message can easily be lost. So just ask the recipient.

If we are talking about a messenger, then some of them, for example, Skype, display a message stating that the delivery was not carried out. This happens if the recipient is offline. ICQ often does not display any messages. In this case, you need to understand that sending can be done through the server, and, most likely, as soon as the user logs into the messenger, the message will be received. But since instant messengers work through a less reliable delivery channel than, for example, mail, the message can easily be lost. So just ask the recipient.

When sending email, it's all up to the client. Most often, delivery notification works as follows: delivery is carried out by default, but if the letter has not found its addressee, then the sender receives a notification. But in addition to this, you can set up a read receipt. The setup process depends on the mail server you are using. For example, in mail.ru, check the box next to “Read notifications”.

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Many of us actively use this messenger, having practically abandoned the use of regular SMS because of this. How can you find out in Viber that a message has been read and whether it was delivered at all? Unlike the same SMS, where only delivery notifications are available, here there is a special status for this.

What are statuses and what are they for?

Status is a display of the state of something: to find out whether a file/text has been sent or not, to understand whether a message has been read on Viber, whether a person is online or offline. You see information about your friends, and they about you. By default, all statuses are enabled and displayed.

Changes can be made in the “Settings” section, “Privacy”, buttons “Online” and “Viewed”. If you turn them off, it will tell you when the person logged into Viber and what messages he viewed. However, having done this on your side, you will not be able to understand that the Viber message has been read and see other information about the interlocutors.

The “Online” status can be changed once every 24 hours.

How to see if your message has been read

Now let’s talk about how to see if a message has been read in Viber. The status of the message is displayed directly below it, on the right. The inscription changes in accordance with the status of the message:

• "Dispatching". The text has not yet reached the server. Highlighted in grey. Typically it takes no more than 30 seconds to send. If the freeze lasts longer than this time, it makes sense to check if the Internet is working.
• "Sent". The text is on the server, in the process of being sent to the recipient. The background under the words is blue.
• "Delivered". The message has reached its destination; it is on the recipient’s device, but has not yet been viewed.
• "Viewed". Your friend opened the chat and read the message.

For what reasons message delivery may be delayed:

• There are problems with the Internet on the recipient's side.
• The recipient's smartphone/computer is turned off.
• The recipient has logged out of Viber on his device.

Let’s clarify what it means “a message on Viber was delivered but not read.” We wrote that the “Sent” status indicates that the text was received by the subscriber to whom it was sent. However, this does not mean that a person will immediately find out what was written to him. He may simply not hear the alert. Therefore, do not worry if this stasis inscription does not change to “Viewed”.

Sometimes the sender needs to know whether his email has been read by the recipient. Especially when important documents, reports, confidential data or urgent news information (request, event, notice, etc.) are sent.

This article will tell you how to find out if an email has been read using popular email services and third-party programs.

Settings in e-mail

Mail.ru

1. Click “Write a letter”.

2. Fill out the form: enter the recipient's address, subject, text of the letter.

3. In the “Subject” column, click the “letter” icon to enable the notification option.

If you need to receive a message that there is no response to a sent letter, click the “call” button and specify the period of time after which you want to notify.

After completing the letter in the form, click the “Notify” option. It's located under the text field, to the right of the "Submit" button.

Just like on Mail.ru, you can set up a notification if a response is not received within the specified period:

• click “Notify”;
• Select the period from the drop-down menu (1 hour, 12 hours, etc.).

Third party services

Monitors sent messages from Gmail and Outlook. All information about the status of email messages after installing the distribution is placed in a special tab.

The service is provided in two tariff plans: paid and free. The commercial version is equipped with advanced monitoring functions.

Russian-language service from StarForce. Informs the user the date and time of opening the letter, the recipient's IP address, and also protects the sent information from leakage (opening attachments, copying). Supports all popular email services.

Bananatag.com

Integrates a “Track & Send” button into your mail profile. After clicking it, the service program inserts an invisible 1x1 pixel image into the text of the letter. A link to it is automatically generated and linked to your account. With its help, the sent letter is monitored (whether it was received, whether it was opened or not).

On the website, select the platform you are using:

• Gmail;
• Outlook;
• Other Email Clients (other email clients).

Install the service addon in your browser. After connecting, its options will appear in your e-mail profile.

Select one of the solutions discussed above and monitor sent correspondence. Convenient work in e-mail!

Perhaps everyone - at least once in their life - wanted to know whether the letter had been read. Typical situations:

• We responded to an interesting vacancy. We sent a resume, portfolio and cover letter, and received silence in response. Complete uncertainty.
• Participate in a creative competition. The deadlines are running out and the winner will be determined soon. At the same time, it is generally unclear whether they looked at your work or not.
• Sent price list/media kit by e-mail. Want to call your potential client soon after they review the proposal. You don't know when this will happen.

A read receipt is not an option: the user can refuse to send a confirmation, read the letter and not respond.

Email marketing services and postmasters, of course, will provide the necessary statistics, but they are only relevant for mass mailing from your own domain. The average user does not need all this.

Thus, there are two ways to find out whether a letter has been read in Yandex / Mail.Ru / Gmail mail.

1. Use ready-made solutions: special services and extensions

There are a number of services and browser extensions that allow you to track whether the recipient has opened your letter. This is the easiest way, but unfortunately:

• Many free products are outdated/not working correctly.
• You have to pay for modern and convenient solutions, otherwise there will be restrictions and advertising.

I studied three different email tracking tools. Among them:

• GetNotify, which hasn't been updated since 2012.

How it works: to find out if a letter has been read, you need to send it to an address like [email protected]. The service then apparently adds hidden code to the content and forwards the email directly to the recipient - [email protected]. When the recipient opens it, the sender receives a notification by email.

Everything would be fine, but there is a problem with the encoding, and the postal service is complaining.

• Bananatag – beautiful, but 0% effective.

According to the description, Bananatag is an excellent solution: 5 emails per day for free; detailed statistics; integration with Gmail, Outlook and mobile email clients.

In fact, not a single letter that was read was displayed on the dashboard. Although I tried to write both on Yandex and Mail. The service couldn’t even tell whether a letter sent to oneself on Gmail had been read :)

• MailTrack for Gmail, with which everything is OK, except for self-promotion.

MailTrack is a useful extension for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Edge. It allows you to find out when a letter in the mail has been read.

The disadvantages of the tool include self-promotion in the signature, but it can be disabled for only one and a half dollars a month. If you buy a subscription for $2.5, you can set up click tracking and real-time alerts.

2. Embed the pixel and track opens through GA

This is the path for those who are not looking for easy ways. And, of course, loves HTML and web analytics.

Essence:

• In the HTML code of the letter through the tag a 1 x 1 image is embedded (hereinafter referred to as a hidden pixel).
• When the recipient opens the email, the necessary data is sent to Google Analytics.
• The system counts the event - this is how you find out whether the letter has been read.

Hidden Pixel Pattern –

More details about URL parameters:

• v– protocol version, no need to change the number.
• tid– Google Analytics counter identifier. You can use an existing one or create a separate one. If you don’t know how, read our guide.

• t– type of action. In our case, this is an event, therefore – “event”.
• cid– anonymous client identifier. You can enter anything, the main thing is not to mention personal data there. The recipient's email is also not allowed.
• ea– event type. We want to know if the letter is open, so we set it to “open”.
• ec– event category. The parameter is optional, but it makes it convenient to study reports.

Now the question is how to implement this magic code into the letter. There are several options:

1. Through editing HTML in Google Chrome.

The essence of the method: click on “view code” → find the desired piece (according to the words from the letter) → right-click and select “edit as HTML” → save via Ctrl+Enter. All this needs to be done when the letter is completely written, but not yet sent.

Alas, this option is not very good. It didn’t work at all in the Yandex.Mail and Gmail interfaces. It worked with Mail, but with glitches: the code worked more than a hundred times even before the letter was read.

1. Using sendhtmail.ru.

Sendhtmail is a simple, free service that sends HTML emails. In one click, insert the code and go.

Sending letters to recipients right away is not an option. The correct solution: first write to yourself by e-mail, and then forward it to others. The main thing is not to forget to change the subject of the letter.

HTML email template with hidden pixel: Hello!
This is a test of an HTML email with a hidden pixel

Best regards, Ivan.

Please note: the code will work when you open a letter from sendhtmail.ru to forward it further. This can be avoided by disabling the display of images in your mail.

1. Via Mozilla Thunderbird.

If you are still used to desktop email programs, you can use Thunderbird. Free cross-platform software from Mozilla allows you to insert HTML code into emails.

Please note

• The hidden pixel will not work if the recipient disables the display of images in the browser/mail service. True, few people do this now - there are no restrictions on the speed and volume of traffic as before.
• Before sending important emails with a hidden pixel, you need to understand that the chosen method works. That is, try it on your emails first. In Google Analytics, the result is immediately visible if you open a report on real-time events (as in the screenshot at the beginning of the second section).
• The code may work earlier: during the process of inserting via Chrome / forwarding an email from Sendhtmail / attempting to send to Thunderbird. Track this in real time in Google Analytics. And just in case, compare the date/time of sending the letter and registering the event in the counter.
• If the number of letters reaches hundreds, the mailing becomes massive - it’s time to completely forget about free mail @yandex.ru / @gmail.com / @mail.ru. Register a domain, set up postmasters, use email marketing services.

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