Information Addicts

During the day I tend to work between a few PCs, so I mostly use webmail for sending and receiving my emails, Fastmail to be more precise as it is simply the best one for my purposes.
The only problem with webmail is that you cannot track any mail that you have sent, the only message you may receive, is if the e-mail address is incorrect and the email is bounced or sent back to you.
To be fair, even Outlook and Thunderbird as good as they are, have fairly basic tracking options.

It’s not that I need to track every e-mail, just the important ones, for example I may want to send an important photo to someone, or even my CV to a potential employer (you have to keep your options open .) Once you send the email how do you know they have received it? Ok, so it hasn’t bounced or been sent back to you, but it would be nice to know when they opened it, if they just deleted it, and even how long they read it for.
This is where ReadNotify comes in to its own.
ReadNotify was released a number of years ago, and is constantly being improved and becoming more sophisticated overtime, it’s very easy to use and has an array of options that you can tweak.

ReadNotify can provide you with many tracking details including some of the below:

• Date and time opened
• Location of recipient (per their ISP city /town)
• Map of location (available on paid subscriptions)
• Recipients IP address
• Apparent email address of opening (if available)
• Referrer details (ie; if accessed via web mail etc)
• URL clicks
• How long the email was read for
• How many times your email was opened
• If your email was forwarded, or opened on a different computer

As I wrote earlier, ReadNotify has many options, which includes you to able to have the e-mail you sent self-destruct after being read once or more, PDF tracking, invisible tracking, and also the ability to track Microsoft word and Excel documents.

How do you use ReadNotify?
To get started you need to sign up for an account, don’t worry as ReadNotify will not use your personal details in any way, or send you spam mail.
ReadNotify is not free, but very inexpensive, and you get a free trial, their cheapest option is $24 (around £12) for the year which gives you 2000 e-mails to play with.
When you have signed up all you need to do is add .readnotify.com at the end of the e-mail address. So for example if you were sending an e-mail to someone, and their e-mail address is john.smith@reed.com, it would now look like john.smith@reed.com.readnotify.com.
If you don’t want to constantly type .readnotify.com, then there is a plug-in that will do it for you.
Minutes after you have sent the e-mail you will receive a tracking e-mail from ReadNotify, depending on the options you choose in your account (which you can change at any time,) will depend on the complexity of the tracking report. Click here to take a look at an example report and see just how much information you can acquire.

The report is emailed to you minutes later after you have sent your email, and you have a choice of formats, PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint or directly in the email itself.
One thing I did notice was that not all the information is always correct, for example I sent an email to my friend and the location was incorrect, other than that ReadNotify was excellent.

Click here to go to the website.

Have you used Readnotify before or something similar, then let us know?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under PC Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.