You can know for sure if your emails were opened.
Have you ever sent an email to someone asking for a response and not gotten one? It’s happened to me on a number of occasions. Usually if it’s important enough for me to follow up with them, they’ll be honest and say that they got too busy or forgot or whatever. Sometimes, though, they’ll take the easier way out and claim they never received the email. In those cases, I have my doubts about their honesty, but I can’t prove anything so I let it go.
But there is a free way to find out if and when your emails have been opened (and presumably read), as well as learning whether any links you included in your emails were clicked on. Marketing companies have been using this strategy for quite some time , but you can do the same thing for your personal email.
One company that offers this service free for five emails a day and $5 a month for unlimited usage is Bananatag (www.bananatag.com). They embed a tiny transparent image in each email hosted on their service and track whether that image has been accessed. Then they notify the sender. In addition to tracking emails, Bananatag organizes and displays metrics to make analysis simple. You can learn more about it by clicking here.
Among the suggestions the article provides for avoiding being tracked are:
- Refuse to “display images” when you receive an email.
- Don’t click on a link unless you’re certain where it goes and whether you want to go there.
- Hover over the link and check its destination in the bottom left corner of your window. If the link text doesn’t match the link that is displayed in the bottom corner, it’s going somewhere else. Even if it does, copy and paste it into your browser’s address bar rather than clicking on it.
Of course, Bananatag isn’t the only company offering this service. Others include Yesware, Thunderbird and IfRead. Have you used any of these services or others to track whether your emails are being opened? Have you taken any steps to avoid being tracked? Have those steps you’ve taken been effective?
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Well, at least the Yemen men weren’t carrying too much toothpaste.
How do we stop the satanic rich bankers from steeling our country from us , when it’s all we can do to just feed our family’s ? I inform everyone I can about the sick basterds running our gov but knowing is just a small piece of the pie!!!
I often cannot open videos, everyone’s asleep when I read emails and I need to be quiet. Sorry but I can also read faster than videos talk anyway.
I would like to know how to build generrater. Without hering all the stories just instructions. Please thank you Allen.
My old DOS computers did what I wanted them to do and didn’t crash!
I received your Power 4 Patriots information .
Is there a cheap way to build a power plant that will produce 220 volts for deep water wells? John
Hey Frank. Just wanted you to know that the rumors of my death have been grossly misleading. I had to be in the hospital for a few days but I am out and back to being a irritating SOB again. Never give up or in.
thanks Stan
what happen with the video,just stop and I can’t see the important part of the message?
Thanks Frank! I thought something existed but did not know much about it. You’re doing us all a great service to keep us informed! Dale.
Have not tried any of the above tracking services. Thanks for the info.
I use Windows Live Email. It seems the lack of privacy is their goal. In the past I have blocked emails with questionable content, but the block does not work and actually seems to verify my email address. Unwanted emails increase. Windows has made a recent change to the email format, making it impossible to delete an email or mark it as junk without highlighting it. You also cannot clear the inbox without going through every email one at a time. I wonder why they have done this. I want to use another email service but fear changing would create a lot of problems. Another issue that I have is why you cannot disable an email once you have created it.
Lawrence Green — I like gmail. It is good at sorting out all of the junk emails and then all you have to do is click one button at the top to mark all of them, and then click the delete forever button. They are gone! I do always glance through them just to be sure that an email I want is not included. Once in a great while that happens, so you click the button at the left of it, then go to the top and hover on the move button, and click to move it to your inbox. If you type an email and then decide to dump it, that is also very easy on gmail. Try gmail, you might find you like it. Oh, one other thing it does that is nice, email replies back and forth, are “stacked” so they are in one place, not spread all over.
It is hard to tell whether you are advocating privacy, or marketing tactics to get around privacy. I have been around email since “before the internet”. Believe it or not, there was electronic communication via BBS (bulletin board systems) and “store and forward” hobbyist networks back to the 1970s.
In most of today’s email client software, there is a setting to request notification on receipt, without using a third party service to spy on the recipient with hidden graphics. This is called a “return receipt”, but the recipient still has the option to refuse or reject sending this acknowledgement.
Your other suggestions for privacy really only apply to mail that is read or composed with bloated web content instead of clean 7-bit ASCII text. Truly private email does not have graphics, links, or attachments. Now let me contradict that by saying digital signatures and encryption, which assure your message has not been altered, and can only be viewed by recipients that already have your public key, does change the message into an attachment. In this case “Worth It!”.
Consider that email is no more private than a postcard, unless you encrypt all correspondence.
You can get PGP, S/MIME, Enigma, GPG and other add-on packages for most email clients in windows, linux, or mac flavors to help protect your email privacy. I am happy to discuss these in more detail if there is interest. I am not an expert in all matters or clients related to email, but I do have decades of actual experience.
Very interesting post! Would love to read more of your material if you started a blog or other website.