Here’s How I Can
Tell If Someone Read My Email
Email tracking, once the purview of salespeople,
is going mainstream.
At this point, we’re all pretty comfortable
with the idea of read receipts on Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, and
other messaging services. You send someone a text, and almost immediately can
see whether or not it’s been delivered or read.
Well, an email
tracker is like a read receipt for your email.
Trackers will let you know if someone read
your email or not. (Or at least, a tracker will tell you if someone opened it.)
They’re becoming increasingly popular. But unlikeread receipts in
messaging, it’s not something you can toggle on or off. The sender turns it on,
and the recipient? Well, the recipient probably has no idea whatsoever that the
tracker exists.
In fact, there are probably a bunch in your
mail right now that you aren’t aware of.Most email trackers use an “invisible” web beacon — usually a small white pixel — to
track email. When you open an email with a beacon in it, your computer accesses
the image file, which is then reported to whoever is tracking you.
Most of these services can tell you a lot
more than just whether or not an email has been opened. They can tell you when
and where it was opened, and how many times. They can tell you if multiple
people — or at least multiple IP addresses — opened the message. Some, like
Mixmax for example, can tell you if the files you sent have been downloaded, or
the links you included have been clicked, too.
The rise of
email tracking
Email tracking was for most of its history
pretty much confined to the world of marketing. The majority of the email
trackers out there — some of which have been around for over a decade — were
initially built for salespeople. customer relationship management (CRM) is a
software industry worth billions of dollars, and the ability to measure the impact and engagement (industry terms
for attention spent, basically) of the emails you send is a big part of it.
But the companies that make email trackers
say that increasingly their software is being used by people in other
industries — including journalists, investors, and entrepreneurs. (One reporter
BuzzFeed News spoke with uses trackers to see if sources are ignoring emails,
or if they just haven’t opened the message.)
Boomerang is an email scheduling app that
also offers optional read receipts, a feature that is growing in popularity,
with usage up 14% in the last year. But, the company says, only 6% of the
people using it are in sales.
Conrado Lamas, head of communications at
MailTrack, says the number of people who track their emails is exploding. The
MailTrack Chrome extension claims over 421,000 active users, and is adding
60,000 new ones very month, according to Lamas. The company, which was founded
in Barcelona in 2013, recently ~celebrated~ its 1 billionth tracked email and is nearing 1 million installations. Bananatag, which claims to have more than 250,000 users, says its technology has
been used to track around 25 million emails. Lamas estimates that since 2013,
the number of people using apps with email trackers has increased by 284%, to
nearly 3 million.
No doubt most of those millions are tracking
emails to their clients, bosses, sources, HR representatives, and assistants,
but many are also tracking messages to their spouses, parents, exes, dog
walkers, and babysitters. Lamas says half of the people using MailTrack are
doing so on their personal email accounts, and other executives in the space
agree.
“We’ve seen an increase, especially in
personal trackers,” Chad Woodford ofTrackbuster told BuzzFeed News.
Trackbuster, for which Woodford runs product,
strips trackers from emails; Woodford also runs product for Senders, an email
enhancement app that shows email recipients info from the sender’s social media
accounts by embedding it into the message. Woodford said Trackbuster was started
precisely because the use of invisible email trackers in personal email was on
the rise.
“Email clients like Outlook used to have a
read receipt feature baked into the header of the email. The recipient could
decide not to honor that. What bothered us was, the way it works now, they put
a hidden pixel or code in the email,” Woodford told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a
little more nefarious in a way.”
Woodford says, based on the more than 50
million messages processed by Trackbuster and Senders, around 60% of all emails
— which includes marketing emails, newsletters, etc. — contain a tracker, while
about 11% of personal emails do.
Caroline
O'Donovan
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/heres-how-i-can-tell-if-someone-read-my-email?utm_term=.dgm7mrwbA#.umBKYQP31
No comments:
Post a Comment