How may times have you sent an email to your friend, but they claim they haven’t received it? Probably more than once. Other times you just want to know if the email you sent was opened by the recipient.
Desktop email clients like Outlook have the feature to get a read-receipt, but online webmail providers do not give this option. Using SpyPig can help take the mystery out of whether your friend read your email or not.
How SpyPig works
To use SpyPig, you will place a tracking image into the email you send. When the recipient opens the email, you will receive a notification email letting you know they have looked at your email.There isn’t much effort you need to put into using SpyPig, which is why it is so handy. You can use it with any email account you can paste a picture into the body of the email… which is pretty much all of them.
Possible uses
- Invites to a party
- Time sensitive emails
- Replies to a job posting
- Request for help from family or friends
How to use SpyPig
SpyPig does not require you to sign up for an account (for basic usage), which is nice. All they ask is that you tell your friends about their service. You want to make sure you are composing an HTML email and the person receiving the email can view and HTML email. On some mobile devices or if they have a slow internet connection, they may view emails as plain or rich-text.When you are on the SpyPig homepage, you will see a lot of text and information. What you are looking for is the form to fill in some information. It should look something like this.
Email subject
In the message title, they suggest you use a title like: To Mr. Bond: Lets meet for lunch so it will be easy to identify in the notification email. This kind of title may seem a bit Spammy though.
If you title the email in a way that explains what the email is about, you will probably know what the notification email is referring to.
The tracking image
The tracking image is the key to the whole process. You have a few options for the tracking image. There is a blank image, various sizes of the SpyPig logo, the option to upload your own image or the comical I know you read my email image.
If you want to be all James Bond about it, you can upload your own picture and use it as a tracking image.
To upload your own image, you will need a to sign up for a free account. This is just an email and a password of your choice. The image you upload can’t be bigger than 300×200 pixels. The file size needs to be less than 3 MB. Having a less obvious picture in the email may raise less of a question than having the SpyPig logo.
Once the image is uploaded, you will need to copy and paste it into the email you are about to send.
Depending on the browser or email program you are using, the process may be a bit different. With Firefox, you can drag the image directly into the email. Chrome will let you right-click, copy and paste the image into the email.
There was a change in how Gmail users need to apply the image to an email. Here is how they are asking you to do it.
For Gmail users: It seems Gmail has changed the way it handles image copy & paste. If your SpyPig tracking is not working anymore, please try the following copy & paste technique:
- Highlight the SpyPig tracking image by dragging the mouse pointer across the image until it is highlighted
- Press Control+C to copy it
- Press Control+V to paste it into your email message
The notification
Once you send the email, you will receive an email from SpyPig when the email is opened. The email will look a little something like this.
NOTE: You might get an email notification as soon as you send your Gmail email out. That’s because Gmail downloads the tracking image once again when you click the Send button, triggering the “email open” alert. Just ignore this notification.
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