I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of disappearing mail – or at least of being told that my email never arrived. I know emails can be acknowledged, but that acknowledgement feature that exists in some email programs can be turned off by users. I want something more robust! What I really wish we had, I told a friend, is registered email, just like we have registered snail mail. When my friend offered an investment in my startup idea, I realized there must be something wrong with that picture - with my luck, it must be out there already.
And right I was. One amongst a number of firms offering a sort of registered email service is ReadNotify.com. It costs $3.99 a month, and works very ingeniously. All you have to do, after subscribing for their free trial, is add ".readnotify.com" to the end of your emails to make them registered. For example, instead of sending email to user@host.com, I need to send mail to user@host.com.readnotify.com. The new suffix is deleted by ReadNotify and is not seen by the mail addressee.
What happens next is interesting, and perhaps a little chilling. Once the mail is received by the addressee, you get an email from ReadNotify informing you of just that. But unlike real life registered mail, the tracking doesn’t stop there. If you keep watching your ReadNotify online management center, you can track for how long your email was viewed, by how many users, and on what computers.
This is a little Big Brother - so I don’t know if I want to use that regularly on my friends, co-workers and clients. However, I do see how this would come in very handy when, for example, I send a proposal or a contract quote. Wouldn’t it be good to see if my proposal has been glanced at, really read, or, when I'm lucky - even transferred to another machine? Yes, but I wonder about the ethics involved. What do you think?
In any case, if you do decide to use the premium, paid version of the ReadNotify service, use the promotion code “workclub” when prompted to get somewhat better terms.
I love this! Thanks for posting this great information.
All of my businesses now use registered email. It's already saved us grief.
No more wondering if our client got the email (and in an interesting twist,
we can now prove our efforts to cease and desist the email STALKER
who has bothered one of our employees for way too long!).
Thanks for the great tip!
Posted by: Kimberly Ann Kubalek | September 27, 2004 at 10:28 AM
Read receipts work only about 5% of the time. Most email services such as hotmail.com etc do not activate such a trigger.
If you want to send your email registered consider a professional service like www.rewpost.com. Found this site pretty straightforward
Posted by: Mel | August 08, 2009 at 01:32 PM
You also should mention that rewpost.com is free.
Posted by: Registered Email | August 25, 2009 at 07:34 AM