Utilities - Readnotify

I am sure you've run into this situation before: you sent an email to someone, a very important message, and they claim they never received it. I've been in meetings where one of my coworkers declared his project was late because he never got the schedule, and I've been chewed out by my boss because he "didn't get my memo".

In virtually every instance, I was reasonably sure that the email was in fact received and read. It was just, well, convenient for the recipient to "forgot"; and, of course, I paid for this forgetfulness.

There is now a service which prevents this kind of nonsense from happening. It's called "Readnotify" and I after using it for a couple of months I don't know how I did without it.

Here's how it works. You sign up for the service, which includes a short trial period. After ensuring that it meets your needs, you pay a small free (it works out to a few pennies per email message you send through the service).

Now, whenever you send an email which you want to verify receipt, you append ".readnotify.com" to the end of the email address. Thus, if you were sending to "dan@kikko.com" you would send your message to "dan@kikko.com.readnotify.com". It's that simple.

This causes the email to be sent to the readnotify service before it gets sent to the recipient. The service reformats the email to include special HTML codes which force, except under specific circumstances, notification to be returned to you upon the opening of the message.

An example of the reporting screen is shown below. As you can see, it shows that my message was read a couple of days after I sent it. Details are included to make it really clear that it was read by the intended recipient, including a small map (which expands if you hover your cursor over it) to help you find the location.

In summary, I found this service to be very useful, inexpensive and simple. Highly recommended.