Registered Email

Posted October 12, 2007 at 7:39 pm by Anne Janse in General.

We’ve all been there: you just sent an email or a text message but you are not sure it has been received or read. Some people put in a phone call straight away: “I just sent you an email, have you seen it?” The direct response you get with a phone call or chat session is lacking when it comes to communication ways like emailing or text messaging, and, particularly in the case of emailing, we fear the sent email was not picked up amidst the bulk of (wanted or unwanted) emails we receive daily.

To this, a technical solution has been created; the so called receipt. The moment the recipient clicks on the email, he gets asked whether he wants to send a return receipt to the sender. This mechanism never really caught on: the pop-up question disturbs the reading of the email, and can also raise the expectation there will be a direct response to this email.

An alternative way of finding out whether an email has been opened is by sending a reference of an external image along with the message (e.g. of 1 pixel) that differs slightly in each email. As soon as the recipient’s email programme receives the email and starts collecting the image from that location, the sender will (one way or the other) be able to see the email has been opened. This method is somewhat more dubious as usually the recipient is not aware this is going on behind the scene. Plus, this method is not foolproof either: some mail clients (e.g. Thunderbird, the email programme I use) do not by default load external images in an email.

There are companies that can be of aid when you want to prove an email was sent to a certain email address. You have to use their mail servers, so, besides the email itself, all sorts of information on sending of the email can be stored. This information can later be used when proof of sending the email is required, for example in case of a lawsuit.

But when in daily use we want to know for sure an email was received, we can, besides being patient for a bit, always rely on more direct ways of communication such as the telephone, Skype, or chat.