Sep 25 2006
MSGTag - Ensuring that emails are read
I run a business web site and communication particularly via emails are very important to what I do but every once in a while, I do get emails claiming that they have not received any emails from us even though we sent them and there wasn’t any mail errors which were generated. Tagging the Return Receipt is helpful only provided the recipient’s email client actually has that feature, most webmail services do not support it and some people just do not want to acknowledge that they have received the emails.
Sadly, the stmp protocol is not perfect, it doesn’t allow you to track once it gets out of your system. Most emails do get to the recipient, some may end up in the Spam or Trash folder and they do not get read, some just got lost in the email blackhole bouncing around and hopefully may resurface in a few days or weeks.
Then today, I discovered a new solution and that is MSGTAG . It is a free program which sits on your computer and works with all SMTP based mail server. What it does is to tag on each outgoing email and once it is read by the recipient, it will acknowledge you via email or their dashboard. You will know when your message gets through. The recipient doesn’t need to do anything to acknowledge it and even works when you mail to a Gmail account which does not support Return Receipt.
I’ve tested it and it works great. All you need to do is to enter the SMTP servers that you use into the MSGTAG Control Panel and then just change the SMTP server and port for each account to that of MSGTAG and you are set to go.
This is a must-have for anyone who finds emails as a critical tool.
There are three variant of the program, the free version adds a simple banner which reads MSGTAG has notified the sender that this message has been received.. There is a the Plus version which allows you to remove or modify that banner. And a MSGTAG Status version which gives you the dashboard instead of emailing you each time someone reads their email which are tagged by MSGTAG.
Try it now! There is nothing to lose. http://www.msgtag.com/home/