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May 15, 2016 2:04 PM in response to Ellen1947by red_menace,★HelpfulNo. Some clients may provide a return receipt or delivery status, but those can be blocked or disabled. There isn't a way to know if an email has actually been read.
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May 15, 2016 6:12 PM in response to Ellen1947by MrHoffman,★HelpfulEllen1947 wrote:
When you send an email, is there a way to know when the recipient spend it?
Sure. Ask the user.
But then what you're really asking for is indistinguishable from what an email spammer wants to know; whether the address is valid and the spam has been read.
There are techniques to try to ascertain whether the user has read the mail. Spammers will embed HTML tracking via remote images or such, and spammers will do everything they can to get their targets to open links or otherwise act upon the mail messages. But this means that more than a few mail clients will be configured to prevent this sort of tracking — because once the spammer knows the email address is valid, the reader wins more spam. Which means many users and many default settings will disable remote image load and read receipts and the rest. Because... spam. Then there can be privacy concerns here, too — an abused spouse might not want to have that read receipt information, and quite possibly the associated IP address or other data — leak out to a sender that might be the abuser.
Now if you're in a corporation, Microsoft Windows Server and Exchange Server can have these sorts of mechanisms enabled; what's known as read receipts. Read receipts get messy with Exchange, too.
So... Yes, there are (unreliable) means for this tracking. I sincerely hope all of the available mechanisms are disabled, that the defaults disallow this, and that all attempts at this will fail, and that every user of mail explicitly locks out every mechanism for tracking the reading of the mail message.
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May 15, 2016 6:14 PM in response to MrHoffmanby Ellen1947,Thanks for the detailed explanation. Helps a lot.