Message Tag, an online service, promises to send you a delivery receipt each time someone opens and reads your email. My friend Dan — who has been known to call within seconds of sending an email to ask, “Did you read my email?” — should get Message Tag.
Or … maybe not. I took a Message Tag for a brief test spin today, and remain unimpressed. Worse … I’m a little irritated that certain limitations weren’t more clearly outlined before I took the time to install the product.
Once I installed Message Tag, the software integrated itself with my email program. (Because I use Outlook, this process was automatic and hassle-free.) With Message Tag running in the background, I sent a number of test emails. Each time those emails were opened and read, I received a Message Tag confirmation receipt (essentially, a short email that says, “Your message to Bill Smith has been read”).
If you’re familiar with Outlook’s read receipts, you know this sort of thing is already possible — except that Outlook usually asks the recipient whether or not a receipt should be sent. With Message Tag, though, the process is completely automatic. By the time the recipient gets to the little Message Tag notice at the end of your email — a single line of text that says a receipt has been sent — it’s too late!
The downside? Probably to thwart bulk e-mailers, the program won’t allow users to generate receipts for messages sent to more than one person. If you want to send the same message to multiple recipients, you must “copy and paste your email into multiple documents, and send each one to an individual recipient.” Who’s got that kind of time?
And while installing Message Tag was a breeze, turning it off is another thing entirely. Once you install Message Tag, your email program won’t work properly unless Message Tag is running in the background. If you make the mistake I did — uninstalling Message Tag while your email program is running — you’re screwed. (To un-screw yourself, reinstall Message Tag, close Outlook, and then uninstall Message Tag again.)
I couldn’t help thinking there was something sinister behind making the program so easy to install … and so difficult to quit using.
Message Tag is free (they’re hoping you’ll love it so much that you’ll pay for the “Plus” service). In my opinion, it’s worth every penny I paid for it.
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