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Danyll Wills

I have often sent e-mails from work that never arrived at their destination addresses. That, at least, is the excuse made by the people who were supposed to have received them.

I think they could have been mistaken for spam and erased. I am interested in some kind of software that will let me know if the message was truly received. Is there a mail client that does this automatically? I think Microsoft had something that almost worked but not quite. Can you advise?

Name and address supplied

Tai Koo Shing

This is an intriguing but extremely sensitive problem. If I may rephrase your question slightly: Is there a way to know when somebody reads your message? And the answer, as usual, is yes and no.

There are several services you can subscribe to that will let you know if somebody has read your message, but there is a very big proviso with this. The 'target' has to be something of an innocent for it to work and you will have to pay for the service. When it works, it is good, but you may not always know if it is working.

Let me explain. If you want to know if Alice has read your e-mail, you can subscribe to a service that will tell you all sorts of things, if it can. It may be able to tell you that Alice read your mail at 2am in central Prague. It may be able to tell you that the message was opened and looked at for five minutes.

This can all be done by the company, provided Alice allows them to. She does this by allowing HTML mail and pictures. Most e-mail clients have a section in the Preferences that will let you turn HTML on or off.

If Alice does not allow HTML mail, the company will not be able to check on her.

So it can be done provided Alice has not done anything to her mail client.

Is this a good or a bad thing? This is the really difficult question to answer. We have all had that conversation: 'Oh, sorry, I never got your e-mail. Must be our server or my client. I've been having trouble with it recently.'

This goes into the annals of business responses such as: 'The cheque is in the mail.'

Not many believe it, even if we cannot prove it. Also, what would you do if you could? Confront the person who is obviously looking for a reason to avoid whatever it is you want to talk about?

There are certainly times when you would want to know and you may want to try one of the services below. Unfortunately, if the person you want to check on is in the least bit savvy, you will never know if he read it.

I tested one of these systems with a friend and he purposely blocked it for about six hours. After that time, he 'allowed' the message to be read. I thought he had read it at 11am. In fact, he had read it 11 hours earlier.

Both these companies give you the ability to test their product. It is something like one month free or a certain number of messages, whichever comes first.

These people do not seem to want many customers because the 'register' link is not easy to find. They give you 25 free e-mails. www.readnotify.com/

Apart from the silly name, these people give you nine free tries. www.didtheyreadit.com/

As for your comment about Microsoft, it does have something called a Read Receipt. This is intrusive and many people get irritated if they get one. It will prompt the receiver of the mail that you want a 'receipt' and he has the option of letting you know.

Here, however, is a Microsoft-only solution that is far less intrusive. It is a pity that it works only on Windows but what else is new? www.msgtag.com/home/



How to be sure of getting your message across