How to Track If Your Email Was Opened or Clicked in Gmail
Receiving read receipts is sometimes very necessary. Especially when you have sent an important email and you want confirmation that the person it is intended for has read it. Usually desktop clients like Microsoft Outlook have it. Personal Gmail does not. Read receipts are available only for Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government customers.
RightInbox is the tool for you to introduce email tracking for Gmail. RightInbox is a Firefox and Chrome extension that seamlessly integrates with Gmail and brings many email management features to your personal Gmail account.
Let’s see some of the key features of RightInbox.
Track Your Emails in Gmail
RightInbox adds three new buttons to your compose window. We will be talking about the Send Now and Send Later scheduling buttons a bit later. First, the Track Now button is the one that has to be clicked if you want to know if your email has landed in the recipients inbox or has been ignored, or worse deleted without being read.
Compose your email and click on the Track button to activate it. After you send the email (or schedule it to be sent later with the RightInbox scheduling feature), and the recipient opens the email in his account, you will receive a notification email alerting you that the email has been read. The tracking feature also lets you know when a link from your message is clicked. The link tracking feature is helpful because it will let you know if the email was just opened or was it also seriously read by the recipient.
Here’s a RightInbox video demonstrating the simple tracking feature:
Schedule Your Emails
In our busy times, email scheduling is a productivity tool. Considering that people work in different time-zones and some emails are not only date-sensitive but also time sensitive, scheduling emails should have been a default Gmail feature. RightInbox enables you to schedule your emails by using the two buttons that lie next to the tracking button. You can click the Send Later button and choose a time frame to send your email. It can be in 1,2, or 4 hours, tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, or a specific time.
As you can see from the screen above, a thoughtful (though logical) feature is that RightInbox has a field for the time-zone. The emails which are scheduled for later, are kept in the Drafts folder. You can choose to delete them if you change your mind about sending them. When they are sent, the emails are moved into the Sent folder. RightInbox does not change the way email normally moves around in Gmail.
RightInbox is currently in beta. Later, premium plans may be introduced having more features, along with the free version. Do you think these two features fill the loophole in Gmail?
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By Indranil Acharya
Published on Sunday, Jan 27th, 2013. Click on the link above to read the author's bio and posts.
Thanks Saikat
