

What bothered us was, the way it works now, they put a hidden pixel or code in the email," Woodford told BuzzFeed News. The recipient could decide not to honor that. "Email clients like Outlook used to have a read receipt feature baked into the header of the email. Woodford said Trackbuster was started precisely because the use of invisible email trackers in personal email was on the rise. Trackbuster, for which Woodford runs product, strips trackers from emails Woodford also runs product for Senders, an email enhancement app that shows email recipients info from the sender's social media accounts by embedding it into the message. "We've seen an increase, especially in personal trackers," Chad Woodford of Trackbuster told BuzzFeed News. Lamas says half of the people using MailTrack are doing so on their personal email accounts, and other executives in the space agree.

No doubt most of those millions are tracking emails to their clients, bosses, sources, HR representatives, and assistants, but many are also tracking messages to their spouses, parents, exes, dog walkers, and babysitters. Lamas estimates that since 2013, the number of people using apps with email trackers has increased by 284%, to nearly 3 million.

Bananatag, which claims to have more than 250,000 users, says its technology has been used to track around 25 million emails. The company, which was founded in Barcelona in 2013, recently ~celebrated~ its 1 billionth tracked email and is nearing 1 million installations. The MailTrack Chrome extension claims over 421,000 active users, and is adding 60,000 new ones very month, according to Lamas. But, the company says, only 6% of the people using it are in sales.Ĭonrado Lamas, head of communications at MailTrack, says the number of people who track their emails is exploding. (One reporter BuzzFeed News spoke with uses trackers to see if sources are ignoring emails, or if they just haven't opened the message.)īoomerang is an email scheduling app that also offers optional read receipts, a feature that is growing in popularity, with usage up 14% in the last year.
Mixmax outlook software#
customer relationship management (CRM) is a software industry worth billions of dollars, and the ability to measure the impact and engagement (industry terms for attention spent, basically) of the emails you send is a big part of it.īut the companies that make email trackers say that increasingly their software is being used by people in other industries - including journalists, investors, and entrepreneurs. The majority of the email trackers out there - some of which have been around for over a decade - were initially built for salespeople. Some, like Mixmax for example, can tell you if the files you sent have been downloaded, or the links you included have been clicked, too.Įmail tracking was for most of its history pretty much confined to the world of marketing. They can tell you if multiple people - or at least multiple IP addresses - opened the message. They can tell you when and where it was opened, and how many times. Most of these services can tell you a lot more than just whether or not an email has been opened. When you open an email with a beacon in it, your computer accesses the image file, which is then reported to whoever is tracking you. Most email trackers use an "invisible" web beacon - usually a small white pixel - to track email.

In fact, there are probably a bunch in your mail right now that you aren't aware of. The sender turns it on, and the recipient? Well, the recipient probably has no idea whatsoever that the tracker exists. But unlike read receipts in messaging, it's not something you can toggle on or off. (Or at least, a tracker will tell you if someone opened it.) They're becoming increasingly popular. Trackers will let you know if someone read your email or not. Well, an email tracker is like a read receipt for your email.
