There are several services available today that let you know when someone opens an email message you sent. That way, you know they got the message. If you’re trying to keep track of a bunch of things to tell a bunch of people, like during wedding planning, that can be a great help. It can also be a blow to your ego to find out how many people are getting your messages but choosing not to respond. And it can cause trouble, as in the case of Jenny, who continued to email Steve after they broke up. When he got a new girlfriend, he quit responding, but she knew he read her friendly emails anyway, because she had a tracker that notified her when they were opened.
One Tuesday in the summer of 2015, Jenny got a flurry of read receipts. Steve had just re-read all of the emails she had sent him the year before in rapid succession. This struck Jenny as strange, especially when she looked at the time. It was 10 a.m.; Steve was likely at work. So she sent him a text message, “Did you just open a bunch of old emails from me?” He said he hadn’t and wanted to know why she thought he had. She told him about the tracking. He called her a creep (mostly kiddingly), but also revealed that he’d gotten back together with the restrictive girlfriend. Apparently, after he’d left for work that day, she had hopped on his home computer and snooped through his email.
“They had a huge fight,” Jenny told me.
There are also enhanced trackers that can geolocate an email recipient. That’s problematic when a stalker uses it. Bosses use it to track employees. But the biggest group that uses email trackers is marketers. Read about email trackers and what they can do at Fusion.
(Image credit: Erendira Mancias/FUSION)