MailTag: Real-time Email Tracking, Made Easy.
Should I send an email? Should I call?
I prefer email over phone calls as I can write much better than I can speak and it is also much easier to follow your conversation using email. But one thing that phone emails are missing is that there is no way to confirm if the recipient received the email or if it was lost in a bunch of emails that were already in their inbox.
Log into MailTag, a new email tracking service, to see if and when your email was read, and if the recipient clicks on the links you put in your email. But how is MailTag different from the many email tracking services out there? Well, let’s find out.
How to get started with MailTag
1. Install MailTag in your web browser (Chrome).
2. Go to your Gmail, there you will see a pop-up window from MailTag, click on the button that says “Enable MailTag”. This will open another pop-up request asking for permission to read and write your email account. Don’t worry, MailTag doesn’t have access to the content of your messages.
3. Then write a new letter. You will see an option Sent with MailTag in your email signature. This means that mail tracking is working fine. If you don’t want the recipient to know about email tracking, you can delete this message by clicking on the little cross next to it. The MailTag watermark will be removed, but emails will still be tracked.
Council. By default, MailTag tracks all emails you send. If you want to disable it for selective emails, you can do so by clicking the small MailTag icon next to the Send option at the bottom. Once disabled, email will not be tracked by MailTag (and data from untagged email will not appear in your MailTag panel).
4. To see if your emails were open, go to the Sent folder and hover over the small MailTag icon next to the email shortcut. If it is open, you can see it here. Alternatively, you can go to the MailTag dashboard by clicking the MailTag icon in the upper right corner of Gmail.
How does email and link tracking work?
When you send an email using mail tracking services, they also embed a tiny transparent image in every email they host on their servers. This image is small enough that it cannot be seen with the naked eye. But when the recipient opens the email, this tiny image sends an HTTP request to the server, it tells the sender that his email has been opened.
Likewise, it turns links inside emails into short links (while leaving the original link text unchanged). This way, every time the user clicks on the link, the trackers will know about it.
Tip: If you are the recipient of an email and want to know if a link is tracking you, just hover over the link and check the destination in the lower left corner of the window.
MailTag Features
1. Free push notifications.
Usually, if you want to know if your email has been read or not, you need to go to their service panel. Receiving a push notification when you open an email is a paid feature in most cases. But MailTag offers free push notification when your emails are read.
2. Free click tracking
The click tracking tool lets you know if the recipient has clicked on the links in the email and how many times they have opened your link. Link tracking is an optional feature in most mail tracking services, but Mailtags offers it in its free version.
3. Free complete history of opening email.
While most email tracking services allow unlimited tracking, you can also track how many times and when a particular email was opened with MailTag.
4. Free control panel
From the looks of it, MailTag is the only email tracking service to offer a free dashboard that shows average email open rates, click-through rates, and tons of other data.
Free MailTag vs MailTag Pro
At the time of this writing, the MailTtag Basic version provides all the features available in MailTag pro including – free push notifications, free link click tracking, dashboard, support, etc.
The only difference I found between MailTag free and MailTag pro is that MailTag PRO just removes the MailTag watermark by default. In the free plan, you will have to manually remove the MailTag watermark by hovering over the red “X” and clicking the red “Remove” button. But otherwise all features are the same in both the free and paid plan.
Summary: MailTag, the best free email tracker
Now that you know how to track email with MailTag, you don’t have to guess if the recipient received your email address or not, you can see it in the control panel. Is MailTag our pick for the best email tracking service? For free users, of course. The free version of the service is easy to use and offers features that competitors make you pay for. The only problem at this point is that MailTag is only available for Gmail. No support for Inbox, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.