How do I get an email forward notification when someone forwards my message?
Hi, everyone, Leo Notenboom here
for askleo.com. This is actually a pretty old question.
There used to be a lot of, let's just say scams
running around that promised you rewards if you forwarded an email message.
Here's the thing, it's confusing because conceptually it
seems like the technology should be able to do that.
It should be able to track whether or not
an email message has been forwarded. In practice, it does not.
Period. There are no exceptions.
Of course, there's always an exception.
There's one very small exception that I'll talk about at the end.
But the bottom line is that no,
you can't get a notification when somebody forwards an email you've sent.
Let me explain why that is we need to talk about.
I'll just call it email notification 101.
One of the things that people would like to have is the ability to understand if
an email that they've sent has been opened or read, or if it's been delivered.
Interestingly enough,
in the internet protocol for email that was devised years ago, 20, 30,
40 years ago, it's one of the oldest protocols out there.
There were facilities built
into the protocol that say, please notify me when somebody opens this
message, or please notify me when this message is delivered to somebody's inbox.
Here's the problem.
Most modern email programs either completely ignore those requests so they
just never happen, or they ask the user before doing anything.
So, for example, Thunderbird is my example.
When an email message I get has what's called a read receipt requested,
which is essentially a notification that the email has been opened,
I get asked, do you want me to send the read receipt?
And of course, I answer, no, don't,
because that would enable spammers to realize that the email message
that they had sent had either been viewed by somebody by virtue of getting a read
receipt, or the other one, the delivery receipt,
they would realize that they had at least reached a valid inbox.
I don't want spammers to get any of that information, and neither do you.
That's why almost all email programs
either ignore those requests or they ask you and we ignore those requests.
Now, there is something called open tracking.
And this is another one of those things
that is incredibly confusing because there are services out there that claim,
absolutely, we can tell you whether or not your email message was opened.
No, they cannot not reliably when you're sending 250 messages.
Some of those will be able to get
open notification, and I'll describe how in just a moment.
But on a specific message, there is no way to guarantee that you'll
get any kind of a notification that the message was opened.
Here's why.
The way that works is the message itself will include an image, like a logo.
The asclio logo, for example,
is included in confident computing my weekly newsletter, subscribe.
The displaying of that logo causes
a request to be made of my server to fetch the logo's image.
That fetch that display of the image allows me to determine that, yep,
this person, this specific person opened my email.
Obviously, I can't tell if they've read it.
I can't watch their eyeballs,
at least not yet, but I can at least determine that the message was opened.
However,
you've probably experienced already that your email program will often tell
you that it will not display inline attachments or inline images by default.
And the reason is exactly the same as read receipt and delivery receipt.
Spammers.
Spammers will include an image in their email to see if you open the email,
you don't want to tell them that it just means you'll get more spam.
That's why you usually have the option of saying, you know what?
From this person, from Leo.
Always display images because they're useful.
It's more than a logo,
it's screenshots and other things that are of use in the email message.
But the bottom line is that there's no way to force that to happen.
There is no way to insist that the user
receiving that email will look at the images.
And as a result, there is absolutely no
way to know whether or not the message has been opened.
If you don't know if it's been opened,
if you don't even know if it's been received, there's no way to track it.
There's just no way to track what happens to it next.
It could get forwarded, it could get deleted, it could get edited,
any number of things could happen to it and you would never know.
Once you send an email,
you have lost all control over it, and you have lost all feedback about it
other than the recipient explicitly replying to you.
Now, like I said, there's an exception.
This exception is incredibly small
and doesn't apply for pretty much anybody who's going to be watching this video.
The exception is this if you, the sender and the recipient,
are on the same email service, and that email service is a corporate or
educational or other institutional email service,
then that services ID department or that institution's It department could
enable the ability to track what happens to individual messages as it travels
through their system, because they control the entire system.
But once a message leaves,
that system goes out to another system, travels out on the internet,
goes to one of the public email services, they lose all track as well.
They're no better off than you and me.
It's only for email messages that travel within that closed system, and even then,
only if that kind of tracking is even enabled.
So I hope that helps understand what is and is not possible.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/11496.
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is Askleocom. Thanks for watching.