How To Track Your Gmail

When you send an email, it can sometimes feel as if you’re tossing it into a black hole. Did your recipient get it or was it waylaid by a faulty spam filter? Was it ever read or did it get lost in the day’s mass of messages? The only way to tell is via email tracking, which lets you know when your email is opened by its recipient.

If you’re a Gmail user, you already know that Google’s service doesn’t have email tracking. But if you use it through the Chrome browser, there are several services that can track your sent emails.

For this roundup, I chose the six that, according to the Chrome Web Store, have the highest number of users: Bananatag, Boomerang, Mail2Cloud, MailTrack, Sidekick and Yesware.

Most of these services include tracking as part of a larger suite of enhanced email functions. For example, some also let you schedule an email to be sent automatically on a date and time of your choice. Another popular feature lets you hide a received email until a speciIfic date and time (when you’re better able to deal with it). Many of these services can also tell you if the recipient clicked a link that you put into the email

(Keep in mind that, with the exception of Boomerang, none of these services informs your recipients that their email is being tracked — in other words, they won’t know that every time they click a link from that email, you’re going to know about it. It’s up to you to tell them — or not.)