Track your emails without asking the receiver to send read receipt

I  have come across two wonderful services which lets you track emails you send and be notified when, where (city/country) and how (desktop/mobile) the email was read.

1. SpyPig

Spypig notification

Spypig service comes in handy if you want to track your email and want to know exactly when your email was read. It can also give you information such as receiver’s location, ip address and application used to read the mail.

SpyPig is a free email tracking tool that notifies you as soon as your recipient opens your email message. SpyPig is dedicated to all those paranoid individuals out there who can’t stand wondering all day if their VIE (Very Important Email) has been read or not.

Before using Spypig, you should know how it works and few limitations of the service. Spypig is not an image sending  service. It generates an HTML snippet with an image and a unique tracking code that you will be adding a in your Email and when ever receiver open your Email, you will get notification for the same.

Please read limitations and requirements of this service before you start tracking your emails: http://www.spypig.com/requirements.php

Both you and the recipient must use an HTML-formatted email, not a plain-text or rich-text formatted email

Spypig notification

Now you are ready to start. Go to this URL for step-by-step guide: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/spypig-receive-read-receipt-confirmation-for-emails.html

2. Bananatag

BananaTag Dashboard

If you want a better GUI and graphical tools to analyze and track each email you send, Bananatag is for you. It has a lot of integration applications such as google chrome extension and firefox addon for gmail, outlook addin. See how-do-i-track-my-emails using bananatag

In addition to the information SpyPig provides, bananatag can also tell you number of times the links inside your email were clicked.

gmail – images are not displayed

P.S. If you see this when you open a newsletter subscription email or a marketing email or a spam, they are tracking you, your location, browser application and time you read the mail. Beware!

P.P.S. Respect other’s privacy.

Email tracking is used by individuals, email marketers, spammers and phishers, to verify that emails are actually read by recipients, that email addresses are valid, and that the content of emails has made it past spam filters. It can sometimes reveal if emails get forwarded (but not usually to whom). When used maliciously, it can be used to collect confidential information about businesses and individuals and to create more effective phishing schemes. – (wikipedia on email tracking privacy issues)