How Can I Know when a User Reads an Important Email Notice?

Question

Our company frequently issues important notices via e-mail as do many other companies do I'm sure. Our management team has turned to us to see if there is any way of knowing when a user reads this important information. I realize forcing a read receipt via e-mail is not reliable at all, so we are trying to explore other options available to us.

One suggestion has been to add a verify link at the bottom of the e-mail that will pass the e-mail address and subject to a page that will do some magic logging.

Another suggestion has been to remove the important subject matter from the e-mail and put it into a web page (maybe in SharePoint) and track users that have visited the page.

I do not think the user should be unnecessarily burdened so I am hoping the SO community has some better suggestions. What is the best way to get some sort of acknowledgement or interaction from the user that could suggest they actually read the important information?

Answer 1

Spammers will often put an 1x1 pixel image in their emails to track who has actually opened the email.

What I mean is that there's an <img /> tag with a URL that could have a querystring or unique filename or something. When the GET attempt is made by the mail client, that's logged, or the script that's in the 'src' attribute renders an actual 1x1 image after some logging/processing is done.

If you are sending out emails to a corporate system in a trusted environment where you know what the mail client being used is, this should work well. If you are sending out emails to the public, this will be very unreliable.

Answer 2

I used to put images in the email. Their source was a php file in my system, which generated the image, but also tracked the users seeing it - as each src looked like url/to/image/myfile.php?user=353453534534.

I have no idea how reliable it is.

Answer 3

Of course, e-mail is not really appropriate for time-sensitive or vital information. If you're using Outlook, and it doesn't block your embedded images to begin with, people can still load the image simply clicking the message and having it load in the preview pane, without having read it.

Far better to show important messages on a user portal, and track which users click OK for the message.

Answer 4

Your users already are burdened with working for a company that has managers that want to know if someone read an email. This is CYA at its best!

Make it as hard as possible, so someone in authority can see how stupid this is.

Put a link to a website where the user has to login every time, search for the message based on a GUID contained in the email body that is one of those images with the crazy letters no one can read, to verify after they have left a blood sample on the finger print reader of their IBM Think Pad that has been disabled by the IT Department because they did a complete non-factory install of Windows XP Pro which does not contain all of the hardware drivers, and then send a confirmation email to each of their managers requiring a confirmation that they received the confirmation.

Answer 5

Personally, the signal:noise ratio in e-mail is getting to the point that I'm far more likely to respond to the little tag in my (U.S.) mailbox that says "Signature Required for proof of delivery" than I am to yet another e-mail with a subject of "YOU MUST READ THSI IMPORTANT MESSAGE NOW!!!1". As a matter of fact, that e-mail would probably land straight in my potential spam bucket, to be reviewed sometime during the next ice age.

Additionally, SMTP is still pretty much "best effort"; there are no guarantees that a time-sensitive, life-saving e-mail will arrive on time... Or at all.

If these messages are mission-critical, I would seriously re-consider your approach.