I know, I know. But my line of work depends on knowing (or at least having a digital trail regarding) whether or not my message was delivered/read. I understand the various potential failure points and privacy implications. Regardless, I’m asking for suggestions from anyone who shares my need.
All that said, I’m currently using Polymail, and I like it very well. It does the job admirably, but there are just enough annoyances and friction points for me to seek something equally solid but better regarding the fine points, so here I am.
I’ve tried both Outlook and Mailbutler, both of which disappointed me, and that’s why I’m using Polymail, which I consider to be far more robust and reliable as far as tracking goes. But damn those little annoyances and friction points.
Anyway, I can live with Polymail, but if anyone has any other suggestions, I’m game.
Searching for “polymail alternative” will result in a good deal of information from multiple sites, some of which I been using for years. Personally I see no problem using email with tracking. Anytime we click on a link or download anything we leave a footprint.
I use Superhuman and this works perfectly for what you need.
I can see when an email is delivered and when emails are opened, although you have to enable it in the settings.
Warning though - it’s $30 a month or $10 a month for academics. In addition, it only supports Gmail.
I use it because I teach 500 students per semester and need to be able to process emails quickly and track email, which is a huge part of my work. If you use email less, it’s a big investment.
I’d be interested in knowing that too. As an email admin I occasionally had a user ask me if a particular email had been delivered. All I could tell them was, if the message isn’t returned to you for some reason it was delivered.
Yeah, that’s my least favorite email question. Even with complete access to the raw server logs, about the best you can do is tell whether or not the email made it to the mail exchanger - it’s a black box from then on.
“All I can tell you is that Google accepted the mail. I have no idea what they did with it after that.”
I’m not sure how it works, only that it does! The status changes from held (as they hold it to allow undo for a few seconds), then it goes to delivered, and then opened (with the time they open it).
Sounds like “delivered” is their shorthand way of saying “handed off to the receiving server”. That’s not nothing, but with modern blackholing and similar technologies it’s a far cry from being assured your email showed up in somebody’s mailbox.
I’ve been using Canary Mail though Setapp, which has this feature, and it does the job well. Only gripe is that it when you send an email to multiple people, it can’t track which specific person has/has not read the email.
Can any of the tracking companies do that? It seems like you’d need to send several separate emails, each with a different tracking pixel, to accomplish that.
