Question

Tracking Software

Asked by: stevendunne

Can you help please?

We send out mail campaigns\shots to our customers every day.  I know within Outlook you can toggle with tracking etc.  However, is there any software, that can integrate with Exchange 2003, and track who are opening these emails, and create reports\data on this?  We really need to know whose opening emails, and who isn't.

I've had a look around but am struggling to find a solution.  Is there anything out there for this?

Your help\advice would be much appreciated.

Thank you

This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.

Subscribe now for full access to Experts Exchange and get

Instant Access to this Solution

  • Plus...
  • 30 Day FREE access, no risk, no obligation
  • Collaborate with the world's top tech experts
  • Unlimited access to our exclusive solution database
  • Never be left without tech help again

Subscribe Now

Asked On
2007-08-16 at 09:44:38ID22767503
Tags

Microsoft

,

Exchange

,

2003

Topic

Exchange Email Server

Participating Experts
4
Points
400
Comments
12

Trusted by hundreds of thousands everyday for fast, accurate and reliable tech support.

  • "The time we save is the biggest benefit of Experts Exchange to Warner Bros. What could take multiple guys 2 hours or more each to find is accessed in around 15 minutes on Experts Exchange." Mike Kapnisakis, Warner Bros.
  • "Our team likes having a resource that is more secure than just using Google and most experts using this service really know their stuff. It's nice to look here first versus using Google." Dayna Sellner, Lockheed Martin
  • "Anytime that I've been stumped with a problem, 9 out of 10 times Experts Exchange has either the accepted solution or an open discussion of the potential solution to the problem." Kenny Red, eBay Inc.

See what Experts Exchange can do for you.

Got a question?

We've got the answer.

Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Need individual assistance?

Our experts are ready to help.

If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Want to learn from the best?

Read articles from industry experts.

Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.

Screenshot of an Article

Working on a long term project?

Store your work and research.

Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Access the answers to your technology questions today.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

What Makes Experts Exchange Unique?

Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Trusted by the world's most respected brands.

image of each brand's logo

Faithfully serving IT professionals since 1996.

Experts Exchange Logo

Try it out and discover for yourself.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

Related Solutions

  1. Email campaign with CFMAIL
    Hi all, I have written a scrip that can handle our email campaign which consists of about 2k emails to be sent out in one hit. Now, we have a new campaign, with about 40k, and growing. I want to be able to send an email, every week, to these candidates. The issues i ...
  2. Help with WebTrends and multiple channel tracking campaign
    We are just about to begin a marketing campaign where we will be promoting a new "product" (actually just a video news story). We will be using print, email and our web pages to promote this and we want to see which channels are producing the best results. We ...
  3. Problem - Email delays via Campaign Enterprise
    We are having problems regarding Campaign Enterprise. Everytime we send a Campaign, only one user can recieve it quickley, whereas the other 19 users will recieve them 2-3 hours later. We are using an exchange mail server, using a software called MailMax. Any idea how to r...

Free Tech Articles

  1. WARNING: 5 Reasons why you should NEVER fix a computer for free.
    It is in our nature to love the puzzle. We are obsessed. The lot of us. We love puzzles. We love the challenge. We thrive on finding the answer. We hate disarray. It bothers us deep in our soul. W...
  2. SCCM OSD Basic troubleshooting
    SCCM 2007 OSD is a fantastic way to deploy operating systems, however, like most things SCCM issues can sometimes be difficult to resolve due to the sheer volume of logs to sift through and the dispe...
  3. Migrate Small Business Server 2003 to Exchange 2010 and Windows 2008 R2
    This guide is intended to provide step by step instructions on how to migrate from Small Business Server 2003 to Windows 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010. For this migration to work you will need the fo...
  4. Create a Win7 Gadget
    This article shows you how to create a simple "Gadget" -- a sort of mini-application supported by Windows 7 and Vista. Gadgets can be dropped anywhere on the desktop to provide instant information, ...
  5. Outlook continually prompting for username and password
    There have been a lot of questions recently regarding Outlook prompting for a username and password whilst using Exchange 2007. There are a few reasons why this would happen and I will try to cover t...
  6. Backup Exchange 2010 Information Store using Windows Backup
    There seems to be quite a lot of confusion around the ability to backup Exchange 2010 using the built in Windows Backup feature. This stems from the omission of this feature prior to Exchange 2007 s...

Cloud Class Webinars

  1. Avoiding Bugs in Microsoft Access
    Alison Balter takes and in-depth look at avoiding bugs in Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the immediate window to debug your applications, invoking the debugger, using breakpoints to troubleshoot, stepping through code, setting the next statement to execute, ...
  2. Top 10 Best New Features in Visio 2010
    Scott Helmers gives live demonstrations of the top 10 new features in Visio 2010. This webinar will teach you how to create compelling diagrams by adding shapes to the page with a single click, linking the shapes in a diagram to data in Excel (or SQL Server, or SharePoint), ...
  3. IT Consultant Business Secrets Revealed
    Michael Munger, Experts Exchange tech pro and IT consultant, pulls back the curtain on his very successful businesses and answers question on every IT consultant and business owner should know about. He shares secrets on what he did to solve the 5 most common problems in IT, ...
  4. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
    Quest CTO, Mike Billon, gives an overview of the steps involved in building a dunamic disaster recovery plan. Through case studies and an examination of software/hardware tooles for monitoring and testing, you'll gain a better understandin of where you are, where you want ...
  5. Organize Your Visio Diagrams with Containers and Lists
    Scott Helmers uses cross functional flowcharts, wireframe diagrams, data graphic legends and seating charts to teach you: how to ustilize all three new structured diagram components in Visio 2010, the best practices for organizeing shapes in previous version of Visio, how to organize ...
  6. How to Us Objects, Properties, Events and Methods in Microsoft Access
    Alison Dalter gives an in-depbth look at objects, properties, events and methods in Microsoft Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the object browser, referring to objects, working with properties and methods, working with object variables, understanding the ...

Join the Community

Give a Little. Get a Lot.

Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.

Join the Community

Answers

 

by: ATIGPosted on 2007-08-16 at 10:29:18ID: 19710325

Are the persons who are opening the emails on the same mail system are the sender?

 

by: SembeePosted on 2007-08-16 at 10:33:25ID: 19710369

What you are talking about is basically a spammers tactic.
Therefore if you try and do anything to track who is opening the messages you will most likely get flagged as a spammer - if the message gets through any spam filters.

Nothing you can do about it - one persons marketing message is another person's spam.

There are applications that can track the email use by modifying any URLs that are in the message. Lyris immediately springs to mind, but there will be others. However trying to track actually opening the message is not something that I would recommend.

Simon.

 

by: redseatechnologiesPosted on 2007-08-16 at 14:50:48ID: 19712839

>>one persons marketing message is another person's spam.

I'll go a step further - all marketing emails are spam.  Purely by definition.

However, I have had to deal with this requirement recently, and while these mails being caught as junk mail was something we had to deal with, this worked surprisingly well -> http://www.readnotify.com

It was like $30 for a year (which includes 2000 messages, I think) and did a fine job.  It worked so well, in fact, that I feel all dirty.

-red

 

by: stevendunnePosted on 2007-08-17 at 02:43:12ID: 19715539

Thanks, I've taken a look at readnotify.com.  It could do the trick, although I'm not sure of it's reporting capabilities?

The emails are being sent externally to customers, via our in-house application, which then sends them through Outlook, then via Exchange.  I don't think Lyris would be effective, and we generate these reports and use the contact database from our in-house application.

"However trying to track actually opening the message is not something that I would recommend"

What do you make of readnotify?  Or wouldn't you track whose opening emails, full stop?

 

by: SembeePosted on 2007-08-17 at 03:20:26ID: 19715642

I haven't used read notify, but I would not be attempting to see who is reading a message at all. That is too close to spammers activities and I don't want to be blacklisted.

As red has already pointed out, there are some people who will flag any kind of bulk email, marketing, newsletters etc as spam. Anything that is not personally directed to them they consider to be spam.

Simon.

 

by: redseatechnologiesPosted on 2007-08-17 at 03:44:41ID: 19715715

Readnotify has a free trial of 25 emails - the reporting is pretty good from what I saw.

More importantly, it is highly configurable, so you can be as spammy as you want to be.

Honestly though, I did it because I had an urgent demand come through for it - given time, I will recommend it be outsourced in the future.

-red

 

by: stevendunnePosted on 2007-08-17 at 03:51:49ID: 19715739

"I haven't used read notify, but I would not be attempting to see who is reading a message at all."

How else could I track this for management then?

"I will recommend it be outsourced in the future"

How do you mean?

 

by: redseatechnologiesPosted on 2007-08-17 at 03:58:41ID: 19715782

>>How else could I track this for management then?

I think that is the point - you need to explain to them that it is a horrible idea, and something that you should not be doing.

>>How do you mean?

There are companies out there that will do this dirty deed for you, ie., sending out and tracking email.  Places like vertical response (or vertical marketing, whatever) will happily spam your customer base on your behalf - you pay, but stay relatively clean.  This is what I will be recommending in the future, and if my client still wants to make a bad choice, at least I gave them another option when it all goes bad.

-red

 

by: stevendunnePosted on 2007-08-17 at 04:24:30ID: 19715870

"at least I gave them another option when it all goes bad."

Why would tracking these emails be such a bad idea then?  All our customer base receive them daily, so it's not unexpected junk\spam.  We're not spammers, these are genuine emails.  

Granted, not everyone will read them, and some will get filtered out by spam filters.  I guess that's why we want to find out, but do I just tell management it's a bad idea because we'll get listed as a spammer?

 

by: redseatechnologiesPosted on 2007-08-17 at 05:28:29ID: 19716154

>>We're not spammers, these are genuine emails.  

Most spammers say that.  I consider spam as bulk email - if it isn't something from someone writing specifically to me, then it is spam.  It doesn't have to be Viagra and Rolexes...

Tracking email takes it to a whole new level - you are now encroaching on your readers, taking their choice away from them, and more importantly, you are using spammers tactics.  I am not on a moral high horse here, I have done it, just letting you know the risks.

You could get listed as a spammer, or you get send it to someone who really doesn't like you and has a whole lot of spare time on their hands to waste on frivilous law suits.  Tracking also increases the chances of spam filters killing the mail, after all, by definition it is spam...

-red

 

by: Computer101Posted on 2008-03-15 at 22:47:33ID: 21135777

Forced accept.

Computer101
EE Admin

20120131-EE-VQP-002

3 Ways to Join

30-Day Free Trial

The Experts

98% positive feedback on 31,087 answers since March 2000. angeliii is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his work with MS SQL Server & Develoment.

He has also proven his knowledge of Visual Basic Programming, PHP Scripting and Oracle Databases.

The Experts

97% positive feedback on 10,752 answers since July 2000. lrmoore has more than 18 years experience in the networking industry.

The six-time Mircosoft MVPs specialties include firewalls, virtual private networking, and network management.

Testimonials

"...and excellent source for support... Kind of like having your very own IT dept." Electriciansnet

Testimonials

"I was apprehensive at signing up at first. However... it has already made my life as an IT administrator much easier." JaCrews

Testimonials

"WOW! You guys have great, active, and knowledgeable people on here." moore50

Business Clients

Business Clients

In the Press

"If you’ve got a question... Experts Exchange can supply an answer.”

In the Press

"...an invaluable aid for both IT professionals and those who require tech support."

In the Press

"where IT professionals provide quick answers on just about any topic"

Business Account Plans

Loading Advertisement...